GIFT   OF 


The 

Things  That  Are  Caesar's 

A  DEFENCE  OF  WEALTH 

—  by  — 
GUY    MORRISON    WALKER 


Author  of  "Measure  of  Civilization,"  "Railroads 
and  Wages,"  "Railroad  Rates  and  Rebates,"  "Trust 
Companies,"  Etc. 


"A  race  oppressed  by  hunger  and  cold  gave 
little  thought  to  the  Immortality  of  the  Soul." 

Measure  of  Civilization,  pg.  21. 

"And  they  sent  unto  him  saying,  Master,  We  know 
that  thou  teachest  the  way  of  truth,  neither  carest 
thou  for  any  man.  Tell  us,  therefore,  Is  it  lawful 
to  pay  tribute  unto  Caesar?" 

"Then  said  He  unto  them,  Render  unto  Caesar  the 
things  which  are  Caesar's." 


NEW  YORK 
1919 


Copyright 

by 

GUY    M.    WALKER 
1920 


417195 


FOREWORD 

HE  problem  of  Labor  and  its  relation  to 
wealth  has  baffled  not  only  labor  agita- 
tors and  capitalists  but  political  philoso- 
phers as  well. 
Labor  claims  that  it  alone  is  responsible  for  the 
creation  of  wealth,  yet  the  minute  the  great  mass  of 
laborers  rebel  and  break  away  from  the  control  of 
their  employers  and  the  controllers  of  wealth,  they 
engage  in  a  mad  orgy  of  destruction.  They  destroy 
not  only  the  material  prosperity  which  they  claim 
hasrbeen  created  by  their  sole  efforts  but  without  dis- 
crimination they  destroy  monuments,  art  objects, 
institutions  and  civilization  itself,  including  the  moral 
codes  that  have  been  built  up  thru  thousands  of  years 
of  effort  to  control  and  inhibit  the  savage  instincts  of 
the  undeveloped,  the  ignorant,  the  vicious  and  the 
unthinking. 

In  Russia,  labor  has  challenged  the  civilization  of 
the  world  and  the  apologists  and  advocates  of 
Bolshevism,  in  the  rest  of  the  world  and  particularly 
here  in  our  own  country,  have  created  a  situation  that 
demands  that  we  search  out  and  prove  the  economic 
and  ethical  foundations  on  which  our  civilization  rests. 
The  most  fanatical  supporter  of  the  labor  dogma 
will  not  pretend  that  the  result  in  Russia  has  been  to 
the  advantage  of  the  laborer.  For  with  the  destruc- 
tion of  wealth  and  the  wiping  out  of  property  has 
come  a  stoppage  of  production,  the  consumption  of 
surpluses,  hunger,  starvation,  famine,  epidemic,  and 


a  reversion  to  savagery,  with  ruthless  assassination 
and  massacre,  in  an  effort  to  secure  possession  of  the 
women  of  other  men,  and  of  the  remaining  scraps  of 
food  that  they  possess. 

Still  if  wealth  cannot  justify  its  existence  then  the 
Bolshevik  movement  is  entitled  to  support  and  the 
laborers  of  the  rest  of  the  world  should  join  the 
movement  and  destroy  all  property  that  exists  as  an 
evidence  of  wealth.  If  on  the  other  hand,  wealth 
shall  be  able  to  justify  itself  and  if  it  shall  be  shown 
that  in  the  absence  of  wealth,  labor  starves  and  that 
only  thru  the  creation  of  wealth  and  its  conservation 
does  labor  escape  hardship,  then  let  us  have  an  end 
of  these  attacks  upon  wealth  and  let  labor  submit  to 
the  direction  and  control  of  those  who  by  their  direc- 
tion and  control  of  labor  not  only  enable  labor  to 
secure  more  for  itself  than  it  otherwise  would,  but  to 
pile  up  those  great  surpluses  which  we  call  wealth 
and  which,  when  used  to  carry  labor  thru  periods  of 
idleness  or  times  during  which  employment  is  impos- 
sible on  account  of  physical  conditions  or  to  support 
labor  thru  the  construction  of  projects,  the  completion 
of  which  extend  over  long  periods  of  time,  we  term 
"Capital";  the  use  of  which  in  the  manner  just  de- 
scribed has  made  possible  the  so-called  "Capitalistic 
Civilization,"  as  we  know  it  throughout  the  world 
today. 

The  problems  which  the  world  professes  to  believe 
difficult  of  comprehension  and  impossible  of  solution, 
really  become  as  simple  as  A  B  C  if  reduced  to  their 
early  and  primitive  forms. 


The  belief  that  in  the  face  of  death  men  dare  not 
tell  the  untrue  or  utter  the  false  has  caused  us  for 
centuries  to  give  to  dying  declarations  a  weight  great- 
er even  than  to  statements  made  under  oath.  These 
chapters  have  been  written  between  successive  opera- 
tions, and  it  has  been  a  constant  question  whether  I 
would  be  able  to  complete  them.  My  condition  has  in 
fact  compelled  me  to  issue  them  in  their  present  un- 
satisfactory state,  but  so  far  as  I  have  been  able  to 
determine  they  contain  nothing  but  the  truth.  Not 
the  whole  truth,  for  that  I  fear  I  shall  not  be  given 
time  to  tell. 

G.  M.  W. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  I  Page 

THE  BEGINNING  OF  WEALTH 1 

Primitive  Man  Produced  Nothing 
CHAPTER  II 

GROWTH  OF  WEALTH 4 

Why  Should  We  Starve? 

CHAPTER  III 

WHAT  IS  WEALTH? 13 

What  One  Man  Has  That  Another  Man  Wants 
CHAPTER  IV 

THE  CREATORS  OF  WEALTH 23 

Not  Labor  But  Brains 

CHAPTER  V 

THE  REWARD  OF  LABOR 47 

The  Laborer  is  Worthy  of  His  Hire  but  No  More 
CHAPTER  VI 

THE  CRITICS  OF  WEALTH 75 

You  Can't  Eat  It  Up,  Or  Drink  It  Up,  Without 
Killing  Yourself 

CHAPTER  VII 
THE    AMERICAN    ATTITUDE    TOWARD 

WEALTH 94 

Can  We  Buy  Peace  by  Paying  Blackmail  ? 
CHAPTER  VIII 

THE  DESTROYERS  OF  WEALTH 115 

Shall    Those   Who    Choose    Not   to   Work   Be 
Permitted  to  Live  By  Plunder? 
CHAPTER  IX 

THE  PROGRAMME  OF  LABOR 129 

It  Proposes  Nothing  Less  Than  a  Reversion  to 
Savagery 

CHAPTER  X 

WEALTH  OR  NO  WEALTH? 143 

What  Did  Poverty  Ever  Produce? 


The  Things 
That  Are  Caesar's 

A  DEFENCE  OF  WEALTH 

CHAPTER   I 

THE    BEGINNING    OF    WEALTH 
Primitive  Man  Produced  Nothing 

WO  men  of  the  Stone  Age,  feeling  the 
pangs  of  hunger,  picked  up  their  stone 
hammers  or  axes  and  started  out  in 
search  of  food.  They  had  hunted  so  long 
in  the  region  of  their  cave  that  they  had  destroyed 
most  of  the  game  that  formerly  roamed  near  their 
habitation,  and  they  now  found  that  they  were  com- 
pelled to  go  farther  and  farther  before  finding  any- 
thing to  eat.  On  this  particular  occasion  they  had 
travelled  and  hunted  for  two  days  without  making 
any  kill,  when  good  fortune  brought  them  across  a 
doe  with  its  fawn.  Starting  in  pursuit  they  soon 
captured  the  fawn  while  the  doe  bounded  away.  In 
their  crude  savage  way  they  divided  the  little  beast 
between  them  and  proceeded  to  satisfy  their  hunger 
by  consuming  all  they  could  hold  of  the  little  animal. 

1 


A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 


Having  finished  their  meal  the  younger  of  the  two 
men  dropped  what  remained  of  his  half  on  the  ground 
and  went  off  to  a  nearby  stream  to  quench  his  thirst, 
but  the  older  of  the  two  with  a  memory  of  his  two- 
day  hunger  still  upon  him  could  not  bring  himself  to 
throw  away  what  was  left  of  his  half,  and  looking 
over  his  head  saw  a  fork  in  the  tree  under  which  he 
had  been  eating,  and  leaping  high  he  dropped  the 
remaining  meat  in  the  forked  branches  and  followed 
his  companion  to  the  stream. 

As  soon  as  he  quitted  the  spot  where  he  and  his 
companion  had  fed,  the  hungry  wolves  rushed  to  the 
spot  and  quickly  devoured  the  offal  and  the  meat 
abandoned  by  the  younger  man,  but  leaping  high 
in  their  efforts  to  reach  the  piece  deposited  in  the  fork 
of  the  tree  by  the  older  man  they  failed  and  soon 
abandoned  their  efforts.  After  sleeping  the  two  men 
began  again  their  pursuit  of  game  and  their  search 
for  food.  But  they  found  it  extremely  scarce  and  the 
second  day  afterward  they  found  themselves  again 
oppressed  with  the  pangs  of  hunger.  Then  the  older 
man  remembering  that  he  had  deposited  what  was 
left  of  his  half  of  the  fawn  in  the  fork  of  the  tree, 
said:  "Instead  of  hunting  farther  for  fresh  game  I 
am  going  back  to  the  food  I  left  in  the  tree,"  and  the 
younger  man  not  knowing  what  else  to  do  followed 
his  elder.  Hunger  hurried  their  steps  and  it  took  but 
a  day  to  get  back  to  the  spot  from  which  they  had 
spent  two  days  in  wandering.  Arriving  there  the 
older  man  found  his  meat  safe  in  the  tree  and  leaping 
up  he  seized  it  and  proceeded  to  satisfy  his  ravenous 
hunger.  The  younger  man  demanded  his  share  but 


THE    BEGINNING    OF    WEALTH 


the  older  man  growled  in  reply  that  they  had  divided 
the  fawn  originally  and  that  he  had  saved  what  was 
left  of  his  half  while  the  younger  man  had  thrown 
away  what  was  left  of  his. 

The  skill  and  strength  of  the  older  man  made  it 
unwise  for  the  younger  man  to  attack  the  older  one 
as  he  felt  an  instinct  to  do,  and  so  he  began  to  beg, 
saying  to  the  older  man,  "Give  me  half  of  the  meat 
"that  you  have  saved  and  when  my  hunger  is  satisfied 
and  my  strength  renewed  I  will  go  hunting  and  give 
you  half  of  my  next  kill."  But  the  older  man  ate  on 
until  finding  his  own  hunger  satisfied  and  some  meat 
still  remaining,  said  to  the  younger  man,  "I  will  give 
you  what  is  left  here  if  you  will  give  me  half  of  your 
next  kill  even  tho  it  be  a  grown  deer  or  a  buffalo."  To 
this  the  hungry  young  man  eagerly  assented,  where- 
upon the  older  man  pushed  over  toward  him  the 
shoulder  of  the  fawn  with  the  meat  remaining  on  it. 

The  saving  of  the  uneaten  portion  of  the  fawn  was 
the  beginning  of  wealth  and  the  use  of  it  to  save  the 
starving  young  man,  the  beginning  of  capitalism, 
while  the  hunting  of  the  younger  hunter  to  repay  the 
debt  he  owed  to  the  older  who  had  fed  him  when  he 
was  starving  was  the  beginning  of  the  wage  system. 


CHAPTER  II 

GROWTH  OF  WEALTH 
W 'hy  Should  We  Starve? 

XOTHER  cave  man  finding  some  fruit  in 
the  forest  ate  what  he  could  and  carried 
a  branch  laden  with  it  back  to  his  cave. 
Dropping  it  on  the  bare  rocks  in  front  of 
his  cave,  he  found  that  the  heat  of  the  sun  had 
withered  the  fruit,  and  though  its  taste  was  changed 
it  was  still  palatable  and  remained  so  for  days.  This 
discovery  enabled  him  to  add  dried  fruit  to  his  diet 
through  the  months  when  fruit  did  not  grow  and  the 
trees  were  bare. 

Another  cave  man  found  a  strange  grass  standing 
though  dead  and  yellow,  and  as  he  walked  through  it 
he  noticed  that  the  rattling  heads  shook  open  and 
scattered  seeds  about  on  the  ground.  Picking  up  a 
few  he  ate  them  and  found  them  strangely  nourishing. 
He  gathered  handfulls  of  the  standing  stalks  and  beat 
the  contents  out  of  the  heads  against  a  rock.  He 
gathered  up  the  grains  and  carried  them  back  to  his 
cave,  to  supplement  the  dried  meat  and  the  dried  fruit 
that  he  had  already  learned  to  preserve. 

Another  primitive  man  found  a  strange  looking 
rock  and  attempting  to  shape  it  into  a  stone  imple- 

4 


THE    GROWTH    OF    WEALTH 


ment,  he  found  that  it  yielded  to  the  stroke  and  that 
under  continuous  hammering  it  grew  flat  and  became 
a  tool  that  gave  him  a  considerable  advantage  over 
his  fellows,  who  thereupon  began  to  search  for  similar 
looking  stones,  that  they  might  fashion  for  themselves 
similar  instruments  and  put  themselves  on  an  equality 
with  him. 

Most  of  these  discoveries  soon  became  known  to 
others  of  the  race,  and  the  conditions  of  living  for 
most  of  mankind  became  easier.  Some  instead  of 
continuing  to  hunt  for  deer,  and  sheep,  and  goats,  and 
buffalo,  protected  the  herds  and  domesticated  them 
and  kept  them  near  at  hand  to  kill  whenever  they  were 
wanted  for  food. 

The  standard  of  living  for  the  race  steadily  in- 
creased as  first  one  man  and  then  another  learned 
how  to  get  more  out  of  the  earth,  whether  it  was  from 
the  game,  or  the  flocks  and  herds,  that  fed  on  the 
lands,  or  whether  it  was  the  grains  planted  in  the  cul- 
tivated soil,  or  the  metals  that  were  dug  from  beneath 
the  surface  or  melted  out  of  the  rocks. 

Now  much  of  the  earth's  surface  was  unfit  for 
human  habitation  under  primitive  conditions,  and 
was  therefore  absolutely  without  value  to  the  race 
until  it  had  learned  how  to  overcome  the  disadvantages 
of  nature.  Forests  were  of  no  use  for  man  until  some 
man  invented  an  axe  with  which  it  was  possible  to 
chop  down  the  trees.  But  the  rude  houses  that  primi- 
tive man  built  out  of  unhewn  logs  were  a  great  waste 
of  timber,  though  it  made  possible  the  cultivation  of 
the  land  in  which  the  trees  had  grown  which  was  rich 
from  hundreds  of  years  of  dropping  leaves. 


A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 


But  another  man  invented  a  saw  and  it  became 
possible  to  build  many  houses  out  of  the  logs  that 
had  formerly  been  used  to  build  one.  And  by  locking 
the  ends  of  these  planks  together,  as  you  lock  the 
ringers  of  one  hand  into  the  other,  it  was  possible  to 
mortise  these  planks  into  bins  and  receptacles  for  the 
saving  of  food. 

Only  when  you  have  seen  the  stone  work  of  primi- 
tive man  and  have  seen  how  by  laborious  rubbing  of 
one  stone  upon  another  he  made  the  edges  fit,  can  you 
realize  how  much  more  it  became  possible  for  man 
to  do  when  he  discovered  iron,  and  learned  how  to 
temper  it,  and  could  chisel  a  stone  into  form  in  a  few 
hours,  where  it  had  formerly  taken  days  and  weeks 
to  accomplish  the  same  result. 

All  of  these  discoveries  and  inventions  inured  to  the 
benefit  of  such  of  the  race  as  were  able  or  willing  to 
use  them.  Some  men  built  houses  and  abandoned 
their  caves,  and  as  they  cut  down  the  forests  they 
turned  them  into  pastures  and  moved  their  flocks  and 
herds  into  places  of  less  danger.  They  cultivated  the 
valleys  and  raised  more  grain  than  they  could  eat. 

They  piled  up  surpluses  of  grain  and  increased  the 
size  of  their  flocks  and  herds.  With  food  in  storage 
some  of  these  men  began  trying  strange  things.  They 
found  that  they  could  make  tools  of  better  design 
and  greater  hardness  and  keener  edges,  than  they  had 
been  able  to  make  before. 

With  their  improved  tools,  their  labors,  both  of 
farming  and  of  mining  and  of  lumbering,  were  mate- 
rially lightened,  and  their  output  in  proportion  to  the 
physical  effort  involved  was  greatly  increased. 


THE    GROWTH    OF    WEALTH 


Because  of  the  use  of  their  improved  tools  which 
made  possible  the  production  of  so  much  more  from 
these  lands  with  the  same  effort  that  they  formerly 
expended  merely  to  secure  a  livelihood  for  themselves, 
their  lands  came  to  be  considered  desirable  and 
whereas  with  their  primitive  tools  they  had  been  barely 
able  to  feed  themselves  by  their  utmost  efforts,  they 
were  now,  by  these  inventions  and  devices  able  with 
the  same  effort  not  only  to  feed  themselves  with  ease 
but  to  produce  enough  to  feed  in  the  same  manner  at 
least  a  score  of  others. 

The  surplus  of  every  one  willing  to  work  increased, 
and  as  it  increased,  he  exchanged  part  of  his  surplus 
for  things  devised  by  others  that  he  thought  would 
be  useful  to  him,  and  sometimes  for  things  that  had 
no  particular  use  but  which  seemed  to  him  to  be  de- 
sirable. One  bartered  some  of  his  surplus  to  others 
in  exchange  for  their  help  in  building  himself  a  larger 
and  stronger  habitation  and  greater  storehouses  in 
which  to  keep  his  increasing  surplus  production,  which 
was  made  possible  by  his  use  of  the  devices  and  in- 
ventions of  other  men,  and  of  the  strangely  efficient 
tools  and  utensils  that  they  produced. 

Some  traded  what  they  had  for  metal  weapons  and 
tools  that  they  could  carry  easily  and  went  on  trips 
of  adventure,  returning  to  tell  of  wild  men  who  had 
never  seen  metal  weapons  but  who  had  so  many  skins 
of  wild  animals  that  it  was  no  distinction  to  be  dressed 
in  furs.  They  told  that  these  wild  men  were  willing 
to  trade  all  the  fur  that  one  could  carry  for  a  single 
metal  spear-head.  Others,  who  travelled  in  other 


8__ A    DEFENCE     OF    WEALTH 

directions,  returned  with  cloths  of  weaves  and  colors 
that  they  had  never  seen  before. 

Those  who  returned  reported  that  in  these  distant 
places  some  products  that  were  scarce  and  highly 
prized  at  home  were  strangely  common,  while  other 
things  which  they  regarded  as  common  were  very 
scarce  and  strangely  prized.  These  reports  caused 
men  to  question  whether  they  had  properly  prized 
what  they  themselves  had  or  whether  they  had  not 
been  willing  to  trade  over  much  for  many  things  that 
were  comparatively  worthless. 

It  was,  however,  impossible  to  get  men  to  agree  on 
what  was  more  desirable.  Some  wanted  one  thing 
while  others  preferred  another.  Some  cared  for 
nothing  but  to  fill  their  bellies  and  after  gorging 
themselves  refused  to  hunt  or  to  work  either  for 
themselves  or  for  anyone  else  until  hunger  compelled 
them.  Others  remembering  their  past  experiences 
refused  to  gorge  themselves  but  ate  sparingly  and 
carefully  saved  the  rest.  Some  insisted  that  caves  and 
tents  were  good  enough  for  anybody,  but  others 
laboriously  gathered  together  stones  and  built  homes 
for  themselves  on  spots  of  their  own  choosing  instead 
of  looking  for  a  cave  where  they  could  find  it.  Some 
finding  a  cave  that  they  desired  already  occupied 
would  fight  the  occupant  for  its  possession,  while 
others  claimed  that  it  was  foolish  to  run  so  great  a 
risk  as  getting  killed  in  a  fight  when  you  could  build 
yourself  a  cave  with  no  danger  and  with  but  little 
more  effort. 

Some  refused  to  plant  grains  and  insisted  that  it 
was  less  effort  to  hunt  for  and  gather  the  wild  grains 


THE    GROWTH    OF    WEALTH 


than  it  was  to  put  so  much  labor  in  cultivating  a  field. 

Others  refused  to  waste  their  time  in  protecting  a 
domesticated  flock  of  sheep  when  there  were  plenty  of 
goats  to  be  had  by  hunting  a  little  further  away.  They 
also  insisted  that  the  flavor  of  the  wild  meat  was  bet- 
ter, and  they  charged  that  the  keepers  of  flocks  were 
weak  and  cowardly  and  really  kept  the  tame  sheep 
because  they  were  afraid  of  the  dangers  of  the  hunt. 

But  as  time  rolled  on  it  was  noticed  that  the  men, 
who  kept  the  domesticated  flocks  and  who  spent  their 
labor  cultivating  fruits  and  grains  instead  of  hunting 
for  them,  ate  more  regularly,  grew  stronger,  and  mul- 
tiplied more  rapidly,  than  did  those  who  depended 
upon  the  chance  of  the  chase  or  luck  in  hunting. 

What  was  more  surprising  was  that  while  the 
cultivators  of  the  soil  and  the  keepers  of  the  flocks 
multiplied  rapidly,  their  flocks  and  stores  of  grain 
multiplied  even  more  rapidly.  On  the  other  hand, 
while  the  hunters  remained  few,  their  supply  of  game 
steadily  diminished  and  the  wild  fruits  and  wild  grains 
became  almost  extinct.  At  last  the  returns  of  hunting 
became  so  scant  that  the  hunt  instead  of  being  a  sport 
became  poorly  rewarded  labor. 

Finally  a  number  of  hunters  exhausted  with  several 
days'  hunting  which  had  found  them  nothing,  said  to 
each  other:  "Why  should  we  starve  here  when  the 
keepers  of  the  flocks  in  the  valley  have  so  many  more 
sheep  than  they  need?  It  is  foolish  for  us  to  go  hungry 
when  sheep  are  to  be  had  for  the  taking.  For  you 
know  those  domesticated  sheep  are  so  tame  that  they 
do  not  know  enough  to  run  away." 


10 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

That  night  a  band  of  the  hunters  descended  on  the 
people  in  the  plain  and  killed  almost  all  of  a  flock  of 
tame  sheep  belonging  to  one  of  the  men  in  the  valley 
and  carried  back  with  them  into  the  forests  all  that 
they  could  carry  of  the  dead  meat.  The  next  morning 
the  owner  of  this  flock  called  together  the  other  keep- 
ers of  flocks  and  showed  them  what  the  hunters  had 
done.  "They  will  fall  on  one  of  you  next  and  our  only 
protection  is  to  unite  and  send  a  punitive  expedition 
against  them,  and  either  to  drive  them  away  or  kill 
them  off.  At  any  rate  they  must  be  taught  that  since 
they  preferred  to  hunt  wild  sheep  instead  of  doing  the 
work  of  raising  tame  ones,  they  must  respect  the 
rights  of  those  of  us  who  have  preferred  to  put  in  our 
time  raising  flocks  and  herds  and  fields  of  grain,  in- 
stead of  depending  on  the  uncertain  rewards  of 
hunting." 

This  suggestion  seemed  a  wise  one  and  gathering  a 
considerable  company  of  the  cultivators  of  grain  and 
keepers  of  flocks,  they  armed  themselves  with  weapons 
which  they  had  devised  for  protecting  their  flocks  from 
wild  animals,  and  with  strange  knives  that  had  been 
modified  from  those  that  had  been  devised  for  the 
cutting  of  standing  grain. 

When  the  hunters  saw  the  plainsmen  coming  against 
them,  they  were  filled  with  derision  that  these  effemi- 
nate men  could  think  that  they  had  a  chance  in  combat 
against  men  like  themselves  inured  to  the  hardship 
of  life  in  the  forest  and  in  the  mountains. 

But  when  they  came  to  close  quarters  the  hunters 
found  that  the  keepers  of  the  flocks  were  able  to  kill 
them  before  they  could  even  get  close  enough  to  strike 


THE    GROWTH    OF    WEALTH U 

back.  For  the  plainsmen  used  new  and  strange 
weapons  that  the  hunters  had  never  seen  before  and 
against  which  they  were  defenseless. 

It  later  became  known  that  the  men  of  the  plain 
had  raised  such  a  surplus  of  food  products  that  a 
number  of  them  had  been  able  to  take  their  time  and 
attention  from  the  raising  of  grains  and  the  protection 
of  flocks  and  spend  it  in  devising  not  only  protectors 
against  the  primitive  weapons  of  the  hunters,  but  new 
weapons  that  would  give  them  an  advantage  over  those 
who  used  the  old. 

The  result  of  the  fight  was  the  almost  total  extinc- 
tion of  the  race  of  hunters.  Those  who  were  not  killed, 
fled  into  the  forests  and  were  not  seen  nor  heard  of 
for  a  long  time,  while  those  who  remained  were 
captured  by  the  men  from  the  plains  and  compelled  to 
work  at  the  cultivation  of  fields  and  the  tending  of 
flocks  for  their  masters,  and  while  they  found  the 
labor  irksome,  they  found  that  it  had  its  compensa- 
tion. For  they  were  able  to  feed  regularly  and  lived 
in  buildings  that  were  far  more  comfortable  than  the 
caves  and  huts  of  the  mountains  and  forests. 

The  contrast  between  the  conditions  of  life  among 
the  hunters  and  the  men  who  cultivated  the  fields  and 
domesticated  the  flocks  were  not  the  only  contrasts. 
Even  among  the  hunters,  the  man  who  was  the  more 
persistent  hunter  or  the  more  skillful  in  stalking 
game,  accumulated  the  largest  supply  of  skins,  and 
was  clothed  warmer  and  had  a  better  bed.  His  family 
was  better  fed  and  his  children  grew  stronger  and 
more  fearless,  than  did  the  children  of  the  lazy  or 
indifferent  hunters  who  were  always  half  starved, 


12  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

poorly  covered,  and  never  had  more  than  a  single 
skin  to  sleep  upon. 

Naturally  the  hunter,  who  had  the  largest  cave  and 
the  most  skins,  was  envied  by  his  fellow  hunters,  who 
declared  that  he  was  lucky  in  hunting  and  they  always 
attributed  their  own  lack  of  food  and  of  skins  to  wear 
or  to  sleep  upon  to  their  bad  luck. 

The  same  inequalities  prevailed  among  the  men  of 
the  plain.  The  man,  who  by  industry  and  care  in- 
creased his  flocks  and  piled  up  greater  stores  of  grain, 
built  for  himself  larger  storehouses  and  a  larger  house 
in  which  to  keep  his  growing  family.  His  children, 
and  his  children's  children,  being  better  fed  and  better 
housed,  were  more  vigorous  physically  and  intellec- 
tually than  those  who  were  not  so  well  fed.  They  also 
had  more  time  to  think  and  so  devised  more  economical 
and  efficient  ways  of  doing  things.  This  still  further 
increased  their  advantage  over  their  fellows  and 
enabled  them  to  build  protective  places  for  themselves 
and  their  families  and  for  their  stores  of  grains,  and 
their  flocks  and  herds.  And  because  of  their  greater 
industry  and  their  increased  production  and  of  their 
saving  and  storing  away  their  surplus  production,  they 
were  called  by  their  neighbors  "rich,"  and  the  build- 
ings which  they  had  built  for  themselves  and  their 
children,  and  the  warehouses  in  which  they  stored 
their  surplus  grains  and  dressed  skins,  and  cured 
meats,  and  their  flocks,  and  their  herds,  were  called 
"wealth." 


CHAPTER  III 
WHAT   IS   WEALTH? 

W hat  One  Man  Has  That  Another  Man  Wants 

iRIMITIVE  men  had  no  difficulty  in  decid- 
ing what  constituted  wealth.  Wealth 
among  them  was  whatever  one  man  had 
that  another  man  wanted.  It  consisted  of 
food,  of  skins,  of  an  advantageously  located  cave,  and 
later,  the  simple  weapons  for  hunting  and  crude  culti- 
vation, and  the  utensils  and  receptacles  in  which  were 
stored  and  preserved  food. 

In  the  days  of  Job,  the  chief  idea  of  wealth  consisted 
of  flocks  and  herds ;  in  the  days  of  the  Roman  Empire 
it  was  chiefly  lands  and  slaves  to  work  them  and 
stocks  of  precious  metals. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  trace  the  progress  of  material 
civilization  whereby  the  huts  of  primitive  men  have 
become  the  forty-story  steel  frame  buildings  of  today, 
and  the  encampments  of  the  early  nomads  have  grown 
into  great  cities  containing  millions ;  whereby  the  dried 
venison  of  the  savage  has  been  displaced  by  millions 
of  carcasses  in  massive  cold  storage  plants;  whereby 
the  earthen  jar  of  wheat  has  been  supplanted  by  great 
elevators,  each  of  whose  compartments  contains  a 
cargo  for  a  trans-atlantic  liner;  whereby  the  torch 
has  been  extinguished  in  favor  of  a  strange  light  that 

13 


14 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

is  transmitted  over  wires,  and  the  drum  signals  of 
the  savage  have  given  way  to  messages  transmitted 
by  an  unknown  force  through  the  air  and  around  the 
earth. 

Attempts  to  define  wealth  must  always  be  considered 
in  relation  to  the  stage  of  material  and  intellectual 
development  existing  at  the  time  the  definition  is 
attempted. 

Adam  Smith,  first  of  English  economists  to  define 
wealth,  capital,  wages,  and  the  principles  under  con- 
sideration, defined  wealth  as  consisting  "of  gold, 
silver,  lands,  houses,  and  consumable  goods  of  all 
kind."  This  definition  you  will  notice  is  distinctly 
primitive,  as  it  confines  wealth  to  physical  material 
things. 

John  Stuart  Mills,  a  later  and  more  scientific 
thinker,  declared:  ''AYealth  consists  of  all  material 
things  produced  by  human  effort."  But  this  definition 
is  frankly  and  plainly  British  in  its  character,  but  it 
introduces  the  element  of  human  effort. 

A  comparatively  unknown  English  economist, 
Mongredien,  says  that :  "Wealth  consists  of  all  those 
objects  of  human  desire  produced  by  human  exertion." 

Mongredien  is  the  first  of  economists  to  call  atten- 
tion to  the  element  of  desire  as  separate  from  use  or 
need.  But  all  of  these  definitions  seem  deficient. 

The  source  of  all  wealth  is  the  soil  of  this  earth. 
And  the  method  of  wealth  creation  is  the  expenditure 
of  human  effort  upon  the  surface  of  the  earth,  whether 
it  be  the  raising  of  cattle  for  food  and  for  hides,  or 
the  raising  of  sheep  for  food  and  for  wool,  or  the 
raising  of  grains  for  food  and  for  oils,  or  the  raising 


WHAT   IS    WEALTH? 15 

of  cotton  and  flax,  and  other  fibrous  plants  for  the 
manufacture  of  cloths  of  various  kind,  and  for  manu- 
factured uses,  or  the  cultivation  of  those  worms  that 
spin  the  wondrous  fibres  that  make  silk,  or  the  digging 
of  clay  to  build  houses  with  greater  ease  and  facility 
than  can  be  done  with  stone,  or  the  digging  of  coal 
to  vitrify  those  brick  and  make  them  impervious  to 
moisture,  or  for  warmth,  or  for  transforming  water 
into  steam,  or  the  digging  of  copper  and  iron,  with 
their  many  uses,  which  have  made  possible  what  we 
know  as  modern  civilization,  or  the  digging  of  those 
scarcer  and  more  ductile  metals  which  we  call  precious, 
of  which  the  race  has  made  many  strange  uses. 

There  is  no  other  source  of  wealth  than  the  surface 
of  the  earth  itself,  and  no  other  means  of  its  creation 
than  the  transformation  of  its  contents  or  products 
by  human  effort  into  forms  useful  to  and  desired  by 
mankind. 

But  there  is  no  value  in  the  earth's  surface  except 
as  it  is  used  by  man,  and  its  value  to  man  is  possible 
only  in  one  of  two  ways,  either  by  men  travelling  or 
transporting  themselves  to  the  place  where  that  par- 
ticular spot  of  the  earth's  surface  lays,  occupying  it 
and  there  supporting  themselves  on  what  they  can 
produce  upon  it,  or  by  a  few  of  them  going  to  the 
distant  spot,  wresting  from  it  that  which  it  has  of  use 
to  mankind  and  carrying  it  back  to  where  it  can  be 
used.  This  was  true  in  primitive  times  and  it  is  true 
today. 

Always  the  limitations  of  man's  ability  to  transport 
himself  to  the  place  where  food  and  other  things  were 
produced  by  the  minimum  effort,  or  to  transport  the 


16 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

products  of  luxurious  climes  to  the  plare  where  man 
himself  found  conditions  better  suited  to  his  own 
existence,  have  operated  to  determine  the  relative  use 
or  value  of  any  part  of  the  earth's  surface  to  the  race. 

No  better  illustration  exists  to  show  how  the  wealth 
of  a  community  depends  upon  its  accessibility  and  the 
use  possible  of  its  products,  than  the  Province  of 
Szu-Chuan  in  China.  This  province  with  an  area  of 
over  two  hundred  thousand  square  miles,  being  slightly 
larger  than  all  New  England,  New  York,  Pennsylvania 
and  New  Jersey,  combined,  occupies  one  of  the  richest 
plateaus  on  the  earth. 

Its  richness  is  shown  by  the  fact  that  it  supports 
with  ease  a  population  of  seventy  millions,  and  has 
within  its  borders  many  great  and  rich  cities.  With 
this  enormous  population  it  actually  produces  such  a 
surplus  of  wheat  that  for  several  years  past  the  price 
of  wheat  in  this  province  has  been  only  from  ten  to 
fifteen  cents  a  bushel,  averaging  about  twelve  cents. 

Naturally  the  lands  of  this  province  used  in  the 
production  of  wheat  are  valued  only  in  proportion  to 
the  value  of  the  wheat  produced  on  them.  Most  per- 
sons on  reading  this  will  demand  at  once  to  know  how 
it  is  possible  for  wheat  to  sell  anywhere  in  the  world 
during  the  past  three  or  four  years  for  as  little  as 
twelve  cents  a  bushel.  But  the  answer  is  quite  simple. 
The  nearest  point  in  this  province  to  the  sea  is  over 
twelve  hundred  miles  up  the  Yangtze  River  from 
Shanghai,  and  between  it  and  the  lower  reaches  of  the 
river,  where  navigation  ends,  are  the  famous  gorges 
that  make  the  province  practically  inaccessible. 


WHAT    IS    WEALTH?  17 


Only  the  most  primitive  methods  of  transportation 
exist  between  the  province  and  the  outside  world.  Al- 
most its  only  products  that  are  valuable  enough  to  pay 
the  expense  of  export  under  present  conditions  are  its 
silks,  some  of  the  finer  grades  of  fur,  and  vegetable 
wax. 

It  actually  cost  last  year  $1.25  a  bushel  to  transport 
wheat  from  the  Province  of  Sze-Chuan  down  to 
Shanghai,  a  distance  averaging,  say,  fourteen  or  fifteen 
hundred  miles.  So  that  the  wheat  that  was  worth  only 
twelve  cents  a  bushel  in  Sze-Chuan  actually  cost  $1.37 
a  bushel  by  the  time  it  reached  Shanghai. 

Now,  if  it  were  possible  to  build  a  railroad  even  from 
the  head  of  navigation  on  the  Yangtze  River,  up  to 
and  through  the  wheat  raising  regions  of  this  province, 
so  that  the  wheat  of  Sze-Chuan  could  be  brought  down 
to  tide-water  at  a  cost  of  fifteen  cents  a  bushel,  as  is 
the  wheat  of  Kansas  and  Nebraska,  it  would  raise  the 
price  of  wheat  in  Sze-Chuan  from  twelve  cents  a 
bushel  to  $1.25  a  bushel.  And  the  wealth  of  the 
province  would  be  increased  ten-fold,  because  its  lands 
would  increase  in  value  in  proportion  to  the  increased 
income  received  from  the  sale  of  its  products. 

In  the  same  way,  Chinese  coal  has  been  produced 
for  years  by  Chinese  labor  so  that  it  could  be  bought 
at  the  mouth  of  the  mines  for  twenty-five  or  thirty 
cents  a  ton,  but  the  absence  of  cheap  methods  of  trans- 
portation and  distribution,  has  made  the  mines  practi- 
cally valueless  because  there  was  little  use  for  the  coal. 

Coal  produced  at  Chinese  mines  at  a  cost  not  to  ex- 
ceed twenty-five  cents  a  ton  was  raised  by  the  mere 


18 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

cost  of  transportation  by  primitive  methods  to  eighteen 
or  twenty  dollars  a  ton  by  the  time  it  reached  Shanghai. 

From  the  fact  that  the  inhabitants  of  this  isolated 
province  in  China  have  maintained  a  practically  sta- 
tionary condition  of  civilization  for  hundreds  of  years 
and  have  devised  no  means  to  remove  from  themselves 
the  handicap  of  isolation  and  remoteness,  it  is  plain 
that  among  their  population  at  least  the  peculiar 
quality  of  brains,  resourcefulness,  or  inventive  genius, 
that  is  necessary  to  make  their  province  accessible,  and 
to  make  possible  the  marketing  in  other  parts  of  the 
world  of  their  surplus  production,  does  not  exist. 

If  the  income  of  its  people  is  to  be  increased  and 
their  standard  of  living  raised,  and  their  wealth  multi- 
plied, it  must  be  by  some  man  outside  of  the  province 
and  not  directly  interested  in  the  increase  of  the  wealth 
and  income  of  its  people.  But  is  there  anyone  who 
will  dare  to  say  that  that  person,  or  group  of  persons, 
that  supplies  cheap  modern  transportation  into  and 
out  of  that  province,  even  though  they  never  expended 
an  ounce  of  physical  effort  therein,  has  had  and  can 
have  nothing  to  do  with  the  creation  of  the  increased 
wealth  of  the  province  and  with  the  increased  income 
and  wages  of  its  inhabitants? 

For  thousands  of  years  it  was  the  practice  of  the 
Race  to  appropriate  without  compensation,  the  de- 
vices invented  by  individuals  with  unusual  gifts,  and 
as  a  result  men  with  extraordinary  gifts  could  little 
afford  to  exercise  them.  Men  created  only  those  things 
in  which  other  men  recognized  their  creative  effort 
and  in  which  they  acknowledged  their  property  rights. 


WHAT    IS    WEALTH? 19 

If  an  individual  raised  a  sheep  or  a  hog  his  fellows 
recognized  that  sheep  or  hog  as  belonging  to  him,  but 
if  he  devised  a  loom  or  a  spinning  wheel,  they  appro- 
priated his  idea  without  even  a  word  of  thanks.  It 
was,  therefore,  more  worth  while  for  the  individual  to 
raise  cattle  and  sheep  and  hogs  or  grains  than  it  was 
to  devise  new  tools,  or  machines,  for  human  use. 

Now  the  reason  for  this  was  that  the  great  mass  of 
mankind  is  unable  to  conceive  of  property  in  any  other 
than  the  physical  sense,  and  as  long  as  the  mass  of 
the  race  could  only  think  property  in  physical  terms, 
it  of  course  conceived  wealth  only  in  physical  terms 
and  denned  it  only  as  having  physical,  visible  and 
tangible  attributes. 

It  has  taken  thousands  of  years  for  even  the  intel- 
lectuals and  speculative  philosophers  to  be  able  to  think 
of  a  mortgage  or  a  lien  as  being  property  the  same  as 
farms  or  hogs. 

It  has  taken  the  world  thousands  of  years  to  realize 
that  it  is  just  as  wrong  to  rob  a  man  of  his  ideas  or 
devices  as  it  was  to  steal  from  him  his  horse  or  the 
trees  off  of  his  land. 

This  is  not  because  there  is  any  difference  in  the 
ownership  of  an  idea  or  a  device,  and  the  ownership 
of  lands  and  the  things  that  grow  on  lands ;  there  is  no 
difference  in  the  moral  quality  of  stealing  a  man's 
horse  or  of  stealing  a  man's  ideas  and  devices.  It  is 
simply  that  the  human  mind  in  its  mass  action  has  been, 
and  is  yet,  unable  to  conceive  of,  property  in  ideas  be- 
cause so  few  of  them  ever  had  any  ideas  themselves, 
but  they  are  quite  certain  of  the  moral  wrong  of 


20 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

stealing  food,  or  household  furniture,  or  clothes,  for 
everybody  has  at  one  time  or  another  lost  some  of 
these  things  or  had  some  of  them  stolen  from  him. 

It  was  not  until  150  years  ago  when  the  world  for 
the  first  time  began  to  realize  the  unique  value  of 
ideas,  and  to  see  the  necessity  of  recognizing  the 
property  rights  therein  of  those  who  had  them,  that 
we  began  the  wonderful  period  of  inventions  that  have 
made  the  past  150  years — years  of  greater  progress  in 
a  physical  and  material  way  than  all  the  thousands  of 
years  since  the  creation  of  the  Race  up  to  that  time. 

With  all  the  vast  supply  of  human  labor  working 
constantly  from  the  beginning  of  time  down  to  the  year 
1780,  it  had  been  able  to  accumulate  only  a  surplus  of 
production  over  consumption  in  all  these  thousands  of 
years,  that  made  the  total  wealth  of  the  world  at  that 
time,  approximately,  100  billion  dollars. 

Remember,  that  up  to  this  time,  mankind  had  denied 
proprietary  or  property  rights  in  ideas  and  devices, 
and  had  recognized  property  rights  only  in  physical 
things,  produced  by  physical  human  labor.  But  at 
that  time  the  Race  for  the  first  time  began  to  recognize 
property  rights  of  individuals  in  their  ideas  and  their 
devices  with  the  result  that  in  the  past  140  years,  human 
intellect  and  human  brains,  have  been  so  devoted  to 
the  devising  of  new  things,  new  machinery,  new 
methods,  new  uses,  the  discovery  of  new  forces,  the 
developing  of  the  science  of  transportation  as  we  now 
know  it,  and  of  the  science  of  communication  as  it  now 
exists,  with  the  result  that  human  physical  labor,  which 
has  not  so  greatly  increased  over  what  it  was  140 


WHAT    IS    WEALTH?  21 

years  ago,  supplemented,  guided  and  for  the  first  time 
directed  by  human  brains,  actively  exercised  in  the 
science  of  production,  has  so  enormously  increased 
not  only  the  per  capita  production  of  the  individual, 
but  the  aggregate  production  of  the  whole  Race,  that 
the  wealth  of  the  world  today  is,  approximately,  1,000 
billions  of  dollars. 

In  other  words,  since  the  time  when  the  race  recog- 
nized the  property  rights  of  ideas  and  devices,  and  the 
productive  value  of  intellectual  effort,  the  wealth  of 
the  world  has  grown  in  140  years  to  be  ten  times  what 
it  had  grown  to  be  from  the  beginning  of  the  race  up 
to  the  period  when  intellectual  values  were  recog- 
nized. 

It  is  in  this  respect  that  the  previous  definitions  of 
wealth  are  deficient,  and  it  is  plain  that  any  scientifi- 
cally correct  and  ethically  true  definition  of  wealth 
must  recognize  and  include  this  intellectual  element 
that  enters  into  wealth  creation. 

The  English  School  of  Economic  Thought  has  fol- 
lowed Adam  Smith,  and  is  still  disposed  to  regard 
wealth  as  purely  material,  and  to  classify  all  labor 
or  effort  that  does  not  result  in  a  material  output  as 
non-productive.  But  the  French  and  Italian  Schools 
of  Economic  Thought  have  insisted  that  any  intel- 
lectual effort  or  thought  that  adds  to  the  use  or  value 
of  the  material  thing  must  be  classed  as  productive 
along  with  the  physical  effort  necessary  to  produce 
the  material  thing. 

The  German  School  of  Economic  Thought  is  more 
truly  scientific  in  that,  they  declare  that  every  service 


22 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

that  is  rationally  sought  by  mankind  must  be  regarded 
as  productive  and  as  doing  its  part  in  the  production  of 
wealth. 

For  instance,  the  English  School  of  Economic 
Thought  has  regarded  the  teaching  of  school,  religious 
instruction,  legal  service  and  advice  and  medical  atten- 
tion as  non-productive.  But  really  all  of  these  are 
equally  productive.  The  school  teacher  by  imparting 
knowledge  to  the  producer  increases  the  producer's 
capacity  to  create  the  things  that  make  wealth.  The 
religious  teacher  inculcates  those  principles  which  lead 
not  only  to  diligence,  and  consequently,  increased  pro- 
duction of  wealth,  but  to  thrift  and  the  conservation  of 
wealth.  The  medical  man  in  protecting  the  health  of 
the  producer  saves  him  from  the  periods  that  he  would 
otherwise  be  a  non-producer,  and  materially  prolongs 
the  period  during  which  he  is  a  producer;  while  the 
legal  man  by  protecting  the  producer  in  the  possession 
and  enjoyment  of  what  he  produces  encourages  in- 
creased production. 

Wealth  therefore  consists  of  all  those  objects  of 
human  need,  use  or  desire,  devised  by  human  genius 
and  produced  by  human  effort  mental  and  physical. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  CREATORS  OF  WEALTH 
Not  Labor  but  Brains 

HE  world  has  not  been  without  great  minds 
in  the  past,  but  Solon  and  Lycurgus, 
though  great  law-givers  were  unable  to 
invent  the  steam  engine.  Socrates,  Plato, 
and  Confucius,  were  great  in  the  realm  of  ethics  and 
metaphysics  but  they  were  unable  to  conceive  elec- 
tricity. Archimedes,  Aristotle  and  Caesar,  founded 
mechanics,  logics  and  military  engineering,  but  they 
were  unable  to  invent  the  telegraph,  the  telephone  or 
armor  plate.  Galileo,  first  conceived  of  our  solar 
system,  but  he  never  dreamed  of  the  mechanical  de- 
vices of  these  times  with  which  we  measure  the  dis- 
tance and  light  of  the  stars  and  determine  the  metals 
that  constitute  their  physical  makeup. 

Social  philosophers  have  ignored  the  most  extraordi- 
nary thing  that  makes  for  human  inequality,  and  that 
is,  the  diversity  of  ability  and  quality  in  the  human 
mind.  Hundreds  of  thousands  of  ordinary  brains  put 
to  work  on  the  identical  problem  can  not  solve  it  un- 
less the  problem  be  one  within  the  comprehension  of 
any  single  one  of  those  thousands  of  ordinary  minds. 
And,  if  it  is  within  the  understanding  and  compre- 
hension of  any  one  of  those  thousands  of  ordinary 

23 


24  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

minds,  any  one  of  them  is  just  as  good  for  the  solving 
of  that  problem  as  the  united  efforts  of  the  hundreds 
of  thousands.  But  if  the  problem  be  beyond  the  un- 
derstanding and  comprehension  of  the  ordinary  mind  it 
must  wait  for  its  solving  for  the  rare  appearance  of 
one  of  those  great  minds  of  unique  quality,  who  is 
able  to  solve  it  and  who  it  sometimes  seems  is  born 
for  the  purpose  of  solving  it.  One  who  when  sent 
solves  it  for  the  benefit  of  the  whole  race.  These  extra- 
ordinary brains  constitute  such  a  rare  treasure  for  the 
world  that  when  they  appear  the  world  should  subsi- 
dize them  and  reduce  their  struggle  for  existence  to  a 
minimum  so  that  these  extraordinary  brains  can  devote 
their  whole  energy  to  the  intellectual  effort  of  solving 
the  heretofore  unsolved  problems  of  the  race. 

With  all  the  great  minds  that  the  world  has  had 
from  the  beginning  of  time,  it  labored  along  with  only 
man-power  and  animal-power,  until  Watt  discovered 
the  expansive  force  of  steam,  and  substituted  steam- 
power  for  man-power.  With  all  the  great  minds  of 
the  past,  the  world  had  to  go  along  without  steam  loco- 
motion until  the  extraordinary  brain  of  Stephenson 
began  the  annihilation  of  space  that  is  now  well  nigh 
accomplished.  With  all  the  great  minds  of  the  past, 
the  human  race  was  only  able  to  invent  a  written  record 
for  itself  about  5,000  years  ago,  and  so  we  know 
nothing  of  the  history  of  the  race  for  the  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  years  thru  which  it  struggled  up  until 
then. 

For  nearly  5,000  years,  the  only  way  its  greatest  and 
best  minds  were  able  to  make  such  a  record  was  to 


THE    CREATORS    OF    WEALTH 25 

chisel  a  few  inscriptions  in  clay  or  on  the  face  of  stone, 
or  to  laboriously  transcribe  them  by  hand  on  skins  and 
barks.  With  the  reproduction  of  books  possible  only 
by  long-hand  transcription,  it  was  impossible  for 
knowledge  to  become  diffused  or  for  education  to  be- 
come general.  Not  until  Gutenberg  and  Faust  adapted 
the  Chinese  art  of  printing  to  European  alphabets  was 
it  possible  for  the  carefully  copied  ideas  of  the  world's 
best  minds  to  become  generally  distributed. 

With  all  the  great  minds  that  the  world  has  pro- 
duced the  race  struggled  along  in  physical  darkness 
while  fear  and  superstition  peopled  the  night  with 
demons  and  ghosts,  until  a  Rockefeller  made  artificial 
light  possible  to  the  poorest  being  on  earth,  by  the 
economical  production  and  cheap  and  general  distribu- 
tion of  petroleum,  which  in  its  turn  is  now  being  super- 
seded in  all  civilized  communities  by  electric  lights, 
which  are  being  constantly  improved  until  it  is  now 
almost  a  scientific  fact  that  they  rival  the  light  of 
day. 

With  all  the  great  minds  of  the  past,  the  world 
never  realized  the  necessity  or  possibility  of  a  pure 
water  supply  or  the  epidemic  infections  due  to  water 
contamination  that  decimated  cities  and  killed  millions, 
until  modern  bacteriology  was  discovered.  And  this 
knowledge  has  not  yet  become  the  possession  of  two- 
thirds  of  the  population  of  the  earth,  for  the  millions 
of  people  in  Africa  and  in  India  and  in  China  are  still 
without  pure  water  and  suffer  terribly  from  epidemics 
that  are  now  no  longer  known  in  Europe  and  Amer- 
ica. Contagion  and  infection  are  so  little  under- 


26 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

Stood  that  the  populations  of  Egypt,  India,  China  and 
the  Philippines,  absolutely  refuse  to  recognize  the 
attempts  of  modern  administrators  to  enforce  quaran- 
tine. 

When  you  consider  the  attitude  of  the  best  educated 
men  toward  labor  from  the  beginning  of  the  race  until 
the  middle  of  the  18th  Century,  it  is  not  surprising 
that  statesmen  and  historians  regard  wealth  as  purely 
material. 

Through  all  this  long  period  the  labor  of  the  race 
plodded  clumsily  along,  undirected  by  its  men  of  extra- 
ordinary ability,  for  it  was  considered  beneath  the 
dignity  of  intellectuals  to  interest  themselves  in  such 
material  things  as  production  or  the  creation  of  wealth. 

Until  this  time  intellectual  effort  was  therefore  con- 
fined to  the  writing  of  religious  works,  theological 
speculations,  histories,  annals,  and  the  production  of 
poems.  Until  comparatively  recent  times  it  was  con- 
sidered a  gross  prostitution  of  mental  abilities  for  a 
man  of  education  and  brains  to  write  a  novel,  or  to 
record  events  of  other  than  political  or  moral  signifi- 
cance. 

The  primitive  attitude  of  the  intellectual  and  edu- 
cated men  toward  labor  and  production  is  nowhere 
better  exemplified  than  in  the  exaltation  of  formal 
literature  by  Chinese  scholars  and  statesmen  down  to 
the  overthrow  of  the  Manchu  Dynasty  in  1911. 

Europe  has  but  slightly  broken  away  from  its  preju- 
dice against  the  participation  in  industrial  production 
or  trade  of  its  educated  men,  and  only  the  knowledge 
of  the  extraordinary  rewards  that  have  followed  the 


THE    CREATORS    OF    WEALTH  27 


exercise  of  intellectual  effort  in  this  direction  in  our 
country,  has  induced  some  to  defy  the  prejudice 
against  it  that  still  exists  throughout  Europe. 

Not  until  comparatively  recent  times  has  intellec- 
tual effort  been  directed  toward  industry,  production, 
and  the  creation  of  what  we  recognize  as  wealth.  It 
is  barely  200  years  since  the  first  engine  was  devised 
as  a  toy,. but  it  was  not  until  1780  that  Watt  devised 
the  first  real  operative  steam  engine,  began  the  revolu- 
tion in  labor  saving  modern  industry  and  inaugurated 
a  new  era  of  production  and  wealth  creation. 

As  we  look  back  over  the  record  of  human  accom- 
plishment from  the  beginning  of  human  records  up 
until  1780,  we  are  not  so  much  astonished  at  what  the 
Race  accomplished,  as  we  are  appalled  by  the  prodigal 
waste  of  human  energy  and  the  reckless  spending  of 
human  life  in  doing  it. 

The  "Pyramids"  are  a  wonderful  monument  of  hu- 
man labor  but  it  is  appalling  to  think  of  the  expendi- 
ture of  human  energy  and  the  waste  of  human  lives 
expended  in  their  creation.  Every  stone  in  those 
Pyramids  was  cut  by  human  hands  from  the  quarries, 
moved  from  their  place  to  the  site  of  the  Pyramids  by 
human  labor,  and  raised  to  the  place  where  they  now 
rest  by  human  energy. 

The  "Great  Wall  of  China"  remains  one  of  the 
wonders  of  the  world,  but  when  you  think  that  every 
one  of  its  bricks  was  made  by  human  hands,  trans- 
ferred to  its  place  by  human  labor,  and  that  not  one 
single  labor-saving  device  such  as  we  now  know,  was 
used  in  the  erection  of  this  monumental  wonder,  you 


28 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

cannot  help,  but  be  oppressed  by  the  thought  of  the 
millions  who  were  driven  to  its  erection. 

The  same  thing  is  true  of  the  "Canals  of  China," 
the  canals  and  so-called  "wells"  or  "tanks"  of  India, 
the  enormous  structures  raised  as  temples  to  appease 
the  angry  gods,  and  this  includes  the  wonderful 
cathedrals  of  Europe. 

This  country  of  ours  is  the  only  one  on  the  face  of 
the  earth  unmarked  and  unmarred  by  any  gigantic 
structure  raised  by  undirected,  unrewarded,  human 
labor. 

In  1782,  when  the  independence  of  our  country  was 
recognized,  two  years  after  the  invention  of  the  steam 
engine  by  Watt,  the  entire  wealth  of  the  world  was 
not  over  100  billion  dollars.  This  represented  the 
entire  unconsumed  surplus  created  by  the  undirected 
labor  of  the  race,  from  its  beginning  up  to  that  time, 
and  the  values  of  the  used  lands  of  the  earth  based 
on  their  then  use  by  the  peoples  of  the  earth. 

I  do  not  intend  to  enter  into  a  discussion  of  the  in- 
crease in  the  standards  of  living,  or  the  relative  values 
of  human  life,  now  and  140  years  ago.  But  I  wish  to 
call  your  attention  to  the  fact  that  at  that  time  there 
was  practically  no  house  on  earth  with  glass  windows ; 
that  ventilation,  sewerage,  and  pure  water  supply  were 
unknown;  that  education  was  within  the  reach  of  but 
few  and  was  still  entirely  classical  and  religious  in  its 
character.  That  the  largest  ship  in  the  world  at  that 
time  (1782)  was  the  then  newly  built  English  Battle- 
ship, the  "Victory,"  the  flagship  of  the  famous  Lord 
Nelson,  which  measured  186  feet  in  length.  The  largest 


THE    CREATORS    OF    WEALTH 29 

ship  that  sailed  in  trade  between  Europe  and  the 
American  Colonies  before  our  Revolution  was  120  feet 
long,  34  feet  beam,  with  a  tonnage  of  about  600. 

The  founders  of  our  United  States  realized  as  had 
no  other  political  thinkers  in  the  world  before,  the 
value  of  men's  brains  in  production.  From  the  first, 
we  have  recognized  to  a  degree  unequalled  by  any 
other  nation  or  people,  the  property  rights  of  men  in 
their  inventions,  devices,  and  ideas,  while  by  our  al- 
most immediate  and  universal  use  of  such  inventions, 
devices,  and  ideas  we  have  made  it  worth  while  for 
our  intellectuals,  our  men  of  brains  and  of  genius,  to 
devote  themselves  to  that  character  of  human  effort, 
namely,  intellectual,  that  has  enabled  labor  in  this  coun- 
try by  seeking  and  accepting  the  aid,  direction  and 
leadership  of  our  best  brains,  to  reach  a  unit  of  per 
capita  production  that  has  never  been  dreamed  of  by 
the  peoples  of  any  other  country  in  the  world. 

I  have  called  attention  to  the  fact  that  the  values 
of  lands  on  the  earth  depend  on  their  accessibility. 
This  was  well  known  and  recognized  by  the  men  who 
undertook  the  development  of  this  country. 

The  first  ship  not  driven  by  human  hands  or  the 
winds  was  Rumsey's  steamboat  that  made  a  success- 
ful trial  on  the  Potomac  in  1782.  The  first  successful 
steamboats  of  the  world  plowed  our  Western  rivers, 
and  within  forty  years,  long  before  the  first  steamship 
crossed  the  Atlantic,  were  going  far  into  our  West, 
up  the  Missouri,  the  Arkansas  and  the  Red  rivers, 
making  them  more  accessible  and  nearer  in  point  of 
time  to  our  Atlantic  coast  than  was  Europe. 


30     A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

The  first  power  loom  was  not  invented  until  1785 
and  was  not  commercially  successful  until  1835.  Until 
that  time  all  our  clothes  were  homespun  and  home 
woven. 

The  first  sewing  machine  was  invented  in  1830. 

Railways,  which  first  supplemented  and  finally  super- 
seded the  canals  and  rivers,  were  not  invented  until 
1826.  By  making  the  remotest  acres  of  our  country 
accessible  and  their  products  easily  marketable,  our 
railways  have  done  more  to  increase  the  wealth  of 
our  people  than  any  other  single  instrument. 

The  electric  telegraph  was  not  invented  until  1835. 

The  first  power  press  was  not  invented  until  1814, 
and  it  was  not  until  1845  that  Hoe  first  invented  the 
fast  press  which  has  made  possible  the  modern  diffu- 
sion of  knowledge  and  news  by  our  daily  press. 

I  remember  in  my  boyhood  in  the  Orient,  seeing 
the  native  blacksmiths  laboriously  making  nails,  ham- 
mering each  one  out  by  hand,  and  I  was  astonished  to 
find  that  being  wrought,  they  could  not  be  driven  into 
hard  wood,  but  that  they  always  had  to  have  a  hole 
drilled  in  the  wood  before  the  nail  could  be  used. 
The  first  nail-making  machine  was  invented  by  Reed 
in  our  United  States  in  1786,  but  it  was  not  until  forty 
years  later  that  his  device  really  came  into  general  use, 
and  that  cut-iron-nails  superseded  the  old  hand-made- 
wrought-iron-nail. 

Adam  Smith,  the  first  political  economist  of  Eng- 
land, uses  the  manufacture  of  pins  as  an  illustration 
of  the  benefits  of  specialized  labor.  Within  fifty  years 
after  he  wrote  his  "Wealth  of  Nations"  the  first  pin- 


THE    CREATORS    OF    WEALTH 31 

making  machine  was  invented  by  Wright  here  in  our 
United  States  (in  1824)  and  the  specialized  labor,  so 
much  admired  by  Adam  Smith,  went  into  the  discard 
along  with  the  political  philosophies  founded  on  his 
illustration. 

The  first  rolled  iron  beam  for  building  construction 
was  not  made  until  1855,  and  the  first  elevator,  a  slow- 
moving  hydraulic  one,  was  not  invented  until  1865. 

The  first  electric  light  did  not  glow  until  1866,  and 
then  only  in  a  laboratory.  It  was  almost  ten  years 
later  before  it  began  to  get  into  commercial  use. 

The  first  steel  ship  was  not  built  until  1870.  This 
invention  opened  new  possibilities  in  world  commerce, 
by  enormously  increasing  the  unit  of  freight  in  foreign 
commerce,  and  reducing  the  cost  of  world  transporta- 
tion. 

The  telephone  was  not  invented  until  1876.  While 
submarines,  wireless  telegraphy,  automobiles,  gasoline 
motors,  aeroplanes,  X-ray,  and  wireless  telephony,  are 
practically  all  the  inventions  or  developments  of  the 
past  twenty  years. 

While  the  value  of  lands  depends  upon  their  accessi- 
bility, their  accessibility  depends  upon  the  railroad, 
or  steamship  transportation  facilities  available  for  the 
transportation  of  their  products. 

The  rewards  of  labor  are  dependent  upon  the  market 
for  the  products  of  labor,  and  from  the  beginning  of 
time  until  the  invention  of  railroads  and  steamships, 
it  took  labor  a  day's  work  to  transport  a  ton  of  its 
product  only  one  mile  away.  But  with  the  brains  of 
the  Race  devoted  to  relieving  labor  from  this  enormous 


32  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

handicap  in  transporting  its  products  to  where  they 
can  be  consumed ;  our  brains  have  devised  methods  of 
transportation  that  enable  us  now  to  transport  the 
products  of  labor  a  ton-mile  for  one-three-hundredths 
of  a  day's  work,  and  this  has  left  to  labor  299/300ths 
of  what  it  used  to  spend  in  carrying  to  market  the 
products  oi  its  labor.  The  saving  to  labor  by  the  in- 
vention of  transportation  facilities  alone  has  enabled 
the  ordinary  laboring  man  to  double  his  per  capita  pro- 
duction. 

It  is  plain  to  be  seen  from  the  record,  which  is 
there  for  anyone  to  read  who  will,  that  it  has  not  been 
human  labor  in  the  physical  sense  that  has  relieved 
itself  of  the  original  limitations  imposed  upon  it  by 
nature,  but  it  has  been  by  the  thought  and  devices  of 
extraordinary  individuals,  who  have  devoted  them- 
selves to  the  task  of  saving  their  fellows  from  the  bur- 
dens imposed  upon  them  by  nature. 

It  has  not  been  "labor"  that  has  produced  the  wealth 
of  the  past  150  years  but  BRAINS.  It  is  not  labor 
in  the  physical  sense  that  is  producing  the  wealth  to- 
day but  BRAINS,  and  it  never  can  be  anything  but 
human  intellect  devoting  itself  to  accelerating  produc- 
tion and  directing  the  less  endowed  members  of 
the  race  in  their  labor  that  will  produce  the  still  greater 
wealth  of  the  future. 

The  literature  of  the  past  has  had  much  to  say  about 
the  conflict  between  Capital  and  Labor,  but  it  is  only 
lately  that  the  peoples  of  the  world  have  begun  to 
realize  that  this  element  of  brains  is  more  important 
in  the  creation  of  wealth  than  is  either  labor  or  capital. 


THE    CREATORS    OF    WEALTH 33 

Political  economists  have  not  yet  discovered  the 
value  of  brains  in  production  and  wealth  creation, 
but  today  we  have  the  astonishing  spectacle  of  capital, 
which  knows  it  has  no  brains,  and  labor  which  realizes 
its  inability  to  direct  itself,  eagerly  competing  for  the 
use  of  brains,  and  offering  the  possessors  of  this 
scarce  article  almost  anything  they  demand  to  accept 
the  management  of  capital  or  the  direction  of  labor. 

Capital  would  generally  be  idle  and  waste  away  if 
it  were  not  for  the  brains  of  some  thinker  who  finds  a 
better  way  to  use  it  than  it  is  being  used.  And  labor 
would  often  be  idle  if  it  were  not  for  this  same  thinker 
who  devises,  invents  and  creates,  undreamed-of  oppor- 
tunities for  labor.  By  holding  before  capital  the  greater 
profits  and  rewards  in  a  new  venture,  the  thinker  se- 
cures the  support  of  capital,  which  labor  would  not  be 
able  to  secure  for  itself. 

Social  economists  claim  that  there  is  only  one  source 
of  wealth — Labor.  Political  economists  insist  that  in 
addition  to  Labor — Land  and  Capital — must  be  classi- 
fied as  additional  sources  of  wealth.  But  they  both 
deny  the  economic  value  of  that  which  is  the  greatest 
of  all  in  the  production  of  wealth— BRAINS.  The 
ability  to  see  the  relation  between  cause  and  effect,  the 
ability  to  see  why  labor  expended  in  one  way  produces 
little  while  labor  expended  in  another  way  produces 
much.  Why  one  crop  is  a  failure  on  a  piece  of  land 
while  another  crop  produces  prodigally.  A  farmer  once 
was  asked  how  much  land  a  man  needed  in  order  to 
make  a  good  living?  And  he  replied,  "If  a  fellow's 


34  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

got  brains  enough  all  he  needs  is  enough  land  to  stand 
on." 

If  labor  complains  that  it  does  not  get  what  it  is 
worth,  it  should  reflect  upon  the  fact  that  there  is 
nothing  cheaper  than  capital.  If  safety  can  be  assured 
to  capital,  the  use  of  it  can  be  purchased  for  two  or 
three  per  cent.  The  great  fortunes  are  made  not  by 
the  possessors  of  capital  but  by  men  of  brains,  men 
who  purchase  the  use  of  the  capital  for  a  small  per 
cent  and  use  it  with  their  brains  to  build  up  great  in- 
dustries. Rockefeller  was  a  great  borrower.  It  is 
brains  that  make  the  difference  between  two  and  three 
per  cent  and  the  profits  that  are  made  in  modern  busi- 
nessjjThe  attack,  therefore,  upon  the  creation  of  wealth 
is  primarily  an  attack  upon  brains,  and  it  is  just  as  well 
that  we  should  recognize  frankly  the  fact  that  the 
great  mass  of  mediocrity  is  attempting  to  make  it  a 
crime  for  a  man  to  have  any  sense,  j 

The  President  of  Cornell  University,  in  a  recent 
Commencement  Address  said  to  his  students :  "To  get 
and  to  have  is  the  motto  not  only  of  the  market  but  of 
the  altar  and  of  the  hearth.  We  are  coming  to  measure 
man — man  with  his  heart  and  mind  and  soul — in  terms 
of  mere  acquisition  and  possessions.  A  waning 
Christianity  and  a  waxing  mammonism  are  the  twin 
spectres  of  our  age."  It  is  strange  to  see  such  eco- 
nomic unsoundness  coming  from  one  who  should  hold 
a  higher  and  a  different  ideal  before  his  students. 

There  are  still  those  in  this  world  who  believe  it  a 
sin  to  have  anything.  They  may  be  found  stalking 
naked  with  their  bodies  smeared  with  ashes  and  their 


THE    CREATORS    OF    WEALTH 35 

hair  uncut  in  greasy  wringlets  everywhere  throughout 
India,  and  some  of  their  unwashed  and  unkempt  dis- 
ciples may  be  found  in  all  parts  of  the  world.  The 
idea  was  prevalent,  even  among  people  of  our  race, 
in  the  Middle  Ages,  and  there  were  many  who  took 
the  vows  of  poverty,  but  thanks  to  an  enlightened  con- 
science and  a  saner  economic  philosophy,  our  race  at 
last  has  come  to  realize  that  man  with  his  heart  and 
his  mind  and  his  soul  was  not  to  spend  his  life  like 
brute  creatures  in  satisfying  only  the  necessities  for 
existence,  but  that  it  was  his  duty  to  do,  to  make, 
and  to  have,  more  than  the  individual  needs  for  him- 
self. 

Do  you  think  there  would  be  any  happiness  in  a 
world  where  you  were  barely  able  to  find  enough  to 
keep  alive  and  where  you  were  constantly  engaged  in 
a  struggle  to  satisfy  the  pangs  of  hunger?  Only  by 
producing  more  than  he  needs,  does  the  individual 
create  a  surplus,  and  only  by  having  more  than  his 
immediate  necessities  require  can  the  individual  secure 
the  leisure  that  is  necessary  for  contemplation  and 
thought,  for  study,  j^Lscovery  and  invention. 

Many  have  toile9  in  useless  and  purposeless  tasks 
without  creating  wealth,  and  there  is  no  greater  eco- 
nomic crime  than  to  spend  useless  toil  on  work  that 
need  never  have  been  done.  The  greatest  conservators 
in  the  world,  and  on  the  whole,  the  poorest  compensat- 
ed and  paid,  are  the  Thinkers,  those  who  study  and 
scheme  to  devise  ways  and  means  of  saving  their  fel- 
lowmen  from  useless  work. 


36  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

The  idea  seems  to  prevail  that  when  the  leader  or 
inventor  or  the  resourceful  manager  of  property  by 
some  device,  or  invention,  or  method,  is  able  to  increase 
the  output  of  his  product,  or  to  reduce  the  amount  of 
labor  necessary  to  produce  the  same  output,  that  he 
should  divide  this  increased  production  among  those 
whom  he  has  directed  in  its  production,  but  if  the  in- 
dividuals working  under  his  direction  do  no  more  work 
than  they  did  before,  it  is  hard  to  see  what  part  they 
have  in  the  increased  production,  or  why  they  should 
be  given  any  share  of  the  increase.  Not  unless  there  is 
something  done  by  or  delivered  by  the  worker  himself 
that  contributes  to  or  helps  make  the  increase  of  pro- 
duction, or  to  decrease  the  amount  of  time  necessary 
for  the  same  production,  can  the  worker  or  laborer 
maintain  any  claim  to  a  share  in  the  increased  product. 
You  might  as  well  propose  to  pay  the  machine  instead 
ofjhe  inventor  of  it. 

(One  of  the  first  principles  of  economics  is  that  con- 
\sujnption  is  limited  but  that  production  is  unlimited. 
Let  a  demand  for  anything  be  created  and  the  supply 
to  satisfy  that  demand  will  increase  at  a  steadily  de- 
creasing cost.  The  demand  of  labor  for  higher  wages 
has  exactly  the  opposite  effect  from  what  labor  de- 
;  sires.  Labor  seems  to  think  that  the  high  wage  that 
it  receives  is  conducive  to  prosperity,  but  the  truth  is, 
that  as  costs  rise  consumption  falls,  factories  cannot 
sell  their  products,  employment  becomes  limited  and 
wages  either  fall  in  order  to  decrease  the  cost  of  pro- 
duction and  stimulate  consumption,  or  else  the  fac- 
tories close  down  entirely  and  wages  cease  altogether. 


THE    CREATORS    OF    WEALTH 37 

The  extraordinary  demands  for  coal  due  to  the 
exigencies  of  the  war  were  made  the  excuse  on  the 
part  of  the  miners  to  impose  upon  the  country  the  most 
preposterous  wage  scale  ever  heard  of.  But  was  the 
prosperity  which  came  to  the  miners  due  in  any  wise 
to  anything  that  the  miners  themselves  had  done  or 
proposed  or  brought  about  ?  Manifestly,  no !  And  the 
high  wages  instead  of  causing  more  coal  to  be  pro- 
duced, had  the  directly  opposite  result. 

A  prominent  divine  recently  declared  that :  "One- 
half  of  the  wealth  of  the  United  States  is  controlled 
by  about  one  per  cent  of  the  American  people,  and  that 
is  unjust."  He  further  said  that:  "There  is  a  just 
discontent  among  the  people  with  the  present  order  of 
things  and  that  the  country's  great  wealth  should  be 
distributed  more  among  the  many  that  contributed  to 
make  it."  Then  he  concludes,  "This  is  the  question 
that  must  be  settled  by  the  intelligent  men  of  the 
country." 

This  last  phrase  of  the  Doctor's  is  the  crux  of  the 
whole  problem.  Why  is  the  accumulated  wealth  of 
the  country  in  the  hands  of  a  comparative  few  ?  It  is 
because  there  are  comparatively  few  of  all  men  born, 
who  are  able  or  willing  to  control  their  appetites  and 
their  spendings.  There  are  few  who  appreciate  the 
need  of  saving.  There  are  few  who  realize  what  can 
be  done  wifh  the  accumulations  of  thrift  and  saving. 

The  schools  and  colleges  of  our  country  are  open  to 
all,  but  there  are  only  a  minority  of  our  youth  who 
ever  finish  the  public  schools.  A  still  smaller  minority 
who  ever  go  to  high  school  and  only  about  one-fifth 


38 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

of  one  per  cent  who  ever  attend  a  college,  while  the 
percentage  of  those  who  actually  finish  their  courses 
is  negligible.  Is  it  unjust  that  the  knowledge  and  edu- 
cation of  the  country  should  be  confined  to  the  less  than 
one-tenth  of  one  per  cent  who  have  graduated  from 
our  colleges?  Are  they  to  be  condemned  because 
through  years  of  sacrifice  and  persistence  they  have 
pursued  the  acquisition  of  knowledge  and  the  search 
for  truth,  and  if  they  have  spent  these  years  in  study 
and  in  learning  how  to  do  things  better  than  their 
uneducated  fellows,  are  they  to  be  condemned  because 
of  their  greater  perception,  their  greater  skill,  or  their 
greater  facility? 

And  if,  as  the  Doctor  says,  the  question  is  to  be 
settled  by  the  intelligent  men  of  the  country,  who  will 
constitute  the  body  to  whom  the  decision  is  to  be  left, 
the  99  million,  9  hundred  thousand,  who  refuse  to 
persevere  in  getting  an  education-,  or  in  the  practice  of 
thrift,  and  long  hours,  or  the  100  thousand,  who  have 
devoted  their  days  and  nights  to  study  and  to  work 
to  accumulate  knowledge  and  experience,  and  to  the 
saving  not  only  of  what  they  have  made  themselves, 
but  of  some  of  that  which  their  ignorant  fellows  have 
attempted  to  waste  or  to  throw  away?  Two  of  the 
largest  fortunes  of  my  own  knowledge  have  been  made 
out  of  garbage! 

Nature  has  not  endowed  all  men  equally,  and  it  is 
natural  that  those  with  a  smaller  endowment  being  the 
more  numerous,  should  attempt  in  some  way  to  handi- 
cap those  with  brighter  minds  and  greater  persistence 
or  disposition  to  stick  to  the  tasks  that  they  undertake 


THE    CREATORS    OF    WEALTH 39 

until  they  finish  them.  The  world  is  made  up  of  those 
who  do  things  and  those  who  try  to  prevent  them  from 
doing  them.  The  attitude  of  those  who  are  doing 
things  is  usually  that  of  ignoring  the  others,  until 
their  activities  impinge  upon  the  plans  of  the  doers, 
then  they  take  only  sufficient  notice  thereof  to  devise 
a  way  of  getting  around  the  obstruction  and  proceed 
with  their  work. 

I  remember  discussing  this  matter  once  with  the 
Editor  of  the  Chautauqua  Magazine.  He  had  declared 
himself  in-  favor  of  certain  proposed  social  legislation, 
and  was  insisting  that  laws  should  be  passed  prohibit- 
ing the  doing  of  a  dozen  different  things  that  he  claimed 
exploited  the  workman.  In  his  tirade  he  said  that  he 
could  not  understand  why  the  great  users  of  labor  did 
not  recognize  the  situation  and  take  some  action. 

I  replied  that  the  men  in  the  world  who  were  doing 
things  were  too  busy  with  their  work  to  pay  any  atten- 
tion to  the  barking  of  the  non-doers;  that  only  when 
the  non-doers  came  up  to  the  doer  and  said  to  him 
you  cannot  any  longer  do  so  and  so,  did  he  take  any 
notice  of  them,  and  then  only  for  the  purpose  of 
stamping  out  the  thing  which  they  had  devised  to 
handicap  him.  I  said  that  I  would  give  him  three 
months  to  devise  any  law  that  he  could  think  of  to 
prevent  my  doing  what  I  had  to  do  in  the  ordinary 
course  of  business,  and  that  I  would  undertake  in 
thirty  minutes  to  find  a  way  of  circumventing  his  law. 
He  thought  that  I  had  little  opinion  of  his  ability. 
But  it  is  not  a  question  of  the  amount  of  ability  but  of 
the  kind  of  ability.  A  man  who  is  in  the  habit  of  doing 


40 A     DEFENCE     OF     WEALTH 

things  quickly  sees  how  to  do  the  same  thing  in  another 
way  when  he  comes  up  against  an  obstacle,  while  the 
fellow  who  is  not  in  the  habit  of  doing  anything  but 
whose  habit  of  mind  is  critical  and  destructive,  never 
can  see  how  a  thing  can  be  done,  sufficiently  to  prevent 
it  from  being  done. 

I  remember  once  dropping  into  the  office  of  Mr. 
Dodd,  the  famous  solicitor  of  the  Standard  Oil  Com- 
pany. I  found  him  sitting  at  his  desk,  tipped  back  in 
his  office  chair,  his  feet  up  on  his  desk,  while  he  gazed 
out  of  his  window  over  the  Bay.  He  seemed  to  be 
thinking,  so  I  started  to  back  out  of  the  door,  when  he, 
glancing  over  his  shoulder,  motioned  to  me  to  come  in. 
I  walked  slowly  across  the  room  from  the  door  to  his 
desk,  then  Mr.  Dodd  spoke,  saying:  "I  was  sitting 
once,  just  as  you  found  me  now,  when  Mr.  Rockefeller 
opened  the  door  as  you  did.  Glancing  in  and  finding 
me  in  this  attitude,  he  stepped  noiselessly  across  the 
room  to  the  back  of  my  desk,  placing  his  elbows  on 
the  desk  he  leaned  over  toward  me,  and  said  in  a 
hoarse  whisper,  'Dodd,  is  this  what  I  pay  you  for?' 
Without  changing  my  position,  I  looked  up  at  Mr. 
Rockefeller  and  replied:  'Did  you  think  you  paid  me 
for  working?'  Every  time  I  attempt  to  leave  for  a 
vacation,  the  evening  of  the  first  day  finds  at  least  a 
score  of  telegrams  from  you,  saying,  'Dodd,  what  about 
this?  Dodd,  what  about  that?  Dodd,  come  back 
quick.'  If  I  do  the  thinking  for  the  rest  of  you,  I  am 
doing  all  that  can  be  expected  of  me." 

A  New  York  paper  some  time  ago  pretended  to 
show  how  the  one-hundred-time  millionaire  was  made. 


THE    CREATORS    OF    WEALTH 41 

It  started  its  description  with  declaring  that  there  was 
a  small  nail  mill  with  only  $75,000  cash  capital  put  in 
but  it  made  money  and  made  so  many  nails  and  sold 
so  many  nails  and  turned  its  capital  over  so  many 
times  in  a  year,  that  somebody  came  along  in  a  few 
years  and  paid  them  one  million,  two  hundred  thou- 
sand dollars  for  the  little  wire  nail  factory  that  had  had 
only  $75,000  invested  to  begin  with,  and  the  Editor 
declared  that  this  constituted  watering  the  stock.  Now 
there  were  a  number  of  other  nail  mills,  which  the  Edi- 
tor did  not  mention,  that  had  more  than  a  hundred 
thousand  dollars  invested  in  them  and  which  never 
made  a  dollar,  and  which,  were  abandoned  and  rusted 
away  or  were  dismantled  and  were  mostly  or  entirely 
lost. 

The  two  mills  had  exactly  the  same  opportunity, 
they  had  bought  the  same  kind  of  machinery,  they 
used  the  same  material  and  they  had  the  same  market, 
but  there  was  no  buyer  for  one,  while  a  million  two 
hundred  thousand  dollars  was  paid  for  the  other.  This 
was  not  because  of  any  water,  you  could  have  pumped 
as  much  into  one  as  into  the  other.  It  was  because  one 
mill  had  $75,000  plus  brains  and  industry,  and  in  the 
other  instance  it  was  one  hundred  thousand  dollars 
minus  brains  and  industry. 

The  same  paper  in  attacking  the  United  States  Steel 
Corporation,  deliberately  misrepresented  the  facts  so 
persistently  that  it  is  difficult  to  discuss  its  state- 
ments without  heat.  It  said  that  Mr.  Carnegie  was 
willing  to  sell  his  entire  steel  business  for  $100,000,000. 
This  happens  to  be  true.  But  it  then  stated  that,  the 


42  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

option  falling  through  that  Mr.  Morgan  offered  to  pay 
Mr.  Carnegie  $300,000,000  in  5  per  cent  bonds,  and  that 
because  of  this  watering  of  the  Carnegie  holding  in 
steel,  the  people  of  this  country  must  continue  to  pay 
$15,000,000  a  year  to  Carnegie  and  his  heirs  forever. 
Now  this  second  statement  deliberately  implies  that 
the  people  of  this  country  were  not  paying  Mr.  Car- 
negie anything  at  the  time  he  was  willing  to  sell  for 
$100,000,000,  but  the  truth  was  that  Mr.  Carnegie  was 
and  had  been  for  some  time  getting  a  profit  of  more 
than  $15,000,000  a  year  out  of  his  steel  business,  but 
because  of  competition  and  the  danger  of  over-produc- 
tion, the  business  was  more  or  less  hazardous  so  Mr. 
Carnegie  was  entirely  willing  to  sell  his  holdings  in  the 
steel  business  on  a  15  per  cent  basis.  But  those  who 
knew  Mr.  Carnegie  very  naturally  believed  that  if  he 
had  $100,000,000  in  cash  he  would  probably  go  back 
in  the  steel  business,  as  it  was  the  only  business  he 
knew,  and  it  was  that  fear  that  made  that  proposition 
fail.  It  was  then  that  Mr.  Morgan  conceived  the  idea 
of  getting  Mr.  Carnegie  to  retire  by  giving  him  securi- 
ties, the  income  on  which  would  assure  him  $15,000,- 
000  a  year,  the  same  as  he  had  been  getting  out  of  the 
business  before,  with  the  distinct  understanding  that  . 
Mr.  Carnegie  would  retire  and  would  not  re-engage  in 
the  steel  business.  The  facts  are  that  Mr.  Carnegie 
had  been  getting  $15,000,000  a  year  out  of  the  busi- 
ness for  years,  but  the  $15,000,000  had  not  been  capi- 
talized. Instead  of  the  United  States  Steel  Corpora- 
tion imposing  one  dollar  of  additional  tribute  upon  the 


THE    CREATORS    OF    WEALTH 43 

users  of  steel  in  the  United  States,  it  merely  assured  to 
Mr.  Carnegie  upon  his  retiring  the  same  income  that 
he  had  been  getting  for  years. 

Up  to  the  time  of  the  organization  of  the  Steel 
Corporation,  a  steel  company  was  compelled  to  figure 
ten  or  fifteen  per  cent  on  the  cost  for  selling.  Even 
the  Carnegie  Steel  Companies  found  their  selling  ex- 
penses slightly  in  excess  of  eight  per  cent  of  the  cost 
of  the  goods  themselves.  But  the  economies  in  selling 
and  distribution  introduced  by  the  consolidation  of  the 
companies  that  made  up  the  United  States  Steel  Cor- 
poration reduced  the  cost  of  selling  the  manufactured 
product  from  over  eight  per  cent  of  the  cost  to  less 
than  one  per  cent. 

It  has  been  charged  that  Andrew  Carnegie  gave  the 
world  nothing  in  return  for  the  $250,000,000  of  bonds 
given  him  for  his  development  of  the  steel  business, 
but  the  truth  is  that  when  Carnegie  began  the  develop- 
ment of  the  steel  business,  iron  rails  were  selling  in 
this  country  for  $130  a  ton,  and  most  of  them  were 
imported  from  England  at  that  price.  When  Carnegie 
retired  from  the  steel  business  he  had  reduced  the  cost 
of  rails  from  $130  per  ton  for  iron  rails,  to  $22  a  ton 
for  steel  rails.  During  this  period,  approximately 
200,000  miles  of  railroad  were  built  in  the  United 
States.  The  saving  in  the  cost  of  construction  of  these 
railroads  in  steel  alone,  brought  about  by  Mr.  Car- 
negie's efficiency,  was  over  $2,500,000,000.  In  other 
words,  the  fortune  that  Mr.  Carnegie  made  out  of  the 
development  of  the  steel  business  was  only  about  ten 


44 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

per  cent  of  the  saving  that  he  made  for  the  railroads 
built  in  America  in  that  time.  Had  it  not  been  for  his 
energy  and  foresight  the  people  of  the  United  States, 
instead  of  paying  interest  to  him  on  $250,000,000, 
would  be  compelled  to  pay  interest  on  the  additional 
$2,500,000,000  that  their  railroads  would  have  cost. 

The  essence  of  Socialism  and  of  the  Labor  dogma  is 
to  deny  the  unequal  gift  of  brains  or  ability  to  indi- 
viduals, and  to  demand  the  assassination  of  the  indi- 
vidual with  unusual  gifts,  if  and  when  he  appears,  as 
a  danger  or  a  menace  to  the  mediocre  ability  and 
brains  of  the  common  mass.  This  has  been  and  is  a 
feature  of  the  Soviet  government  in  Russia,  which  has 
frankly  declared  war  on  all  so-called  "intellectuals" 
and  has  hunted  out  and  exterminated  all  the  educated 
men  and  women  that  it  could  find.  But  it  is  easy  to 
see  where  this  will  lead  for  the  mass,  which  has  always 
profited  by  and  benefited  by  the  inventions  of  the 
brains  and  ability  of  these  extraordinarily  gifted  indi- 
viduals. 

Denying  the  rights  of  individuals  to  possess  extra- 
ordinary gifts,  Socialism  refuses  to  inventors  any 
rights  in  their  devices  that  would  give  them  any  re- 
ward over  others.  If  they  should  succeed  in  their 
propaganda,  inventors,  or  those  with  the  ability  to 
invent,  knowing  that  the  mediocre  mass  would  appro- 
priate their  discoveries  and  that  they  would  get  nothing 
more  out  of  them  than  would  the  veriest  lout  who 
never  had  a  thought,  would  refuse  to  exercise  their 
extraordinary  gifts.  They  would  stop  trying  to  think 
and  would  cease  to  invent,  and  the  world  would  be 


THE    CREATORS    OF    WEALTH  45 

the  loser.  The  essential  weakness  of  Socialism  is  that 
in  destroying  the  incentive  for  improvement  and  prog- 
ress, it  destroys  the  possibility  of  improving  the  con- 
ditions of  the  ignorant  and  mediocre  and  that  in  its 
efforts  to  cheat  extraordinary  ability  out  of  a  fair 
compensation,  it  robs  itself  of  all  benefit  that  it  would 
derive  from  the  exercise  of  the  gifts  of  its  most  intelli- 
gent individuals. 

The  fact  that  we  now  get  our  news  from  Europe 
in  an  hour  instead  of  ten  days  is  due  in  no  wise  to  any 
effort  or  thing  done  on  the  part  of  the  mediocre  mass 
in  the  world,  but  was  due  solely  and  entirely  to  the 
vision,  the  genius  and  the  work  of  Cyrus  W.  Field, 
who  lost  his  entire  fortune  in  an  effort  to  furnish  the 
people  with  a  service  that  they  ridiculed. 

The  fact  that  we  are  now  talking  without  the  med- 
ium of  wires  but  may  actually  telephone  to  our  friends 
through  the  air,  is  due  in  no  wise  to  anything  that  the 
mass  of  people  did,  not  even  to  the  genius  of  Marconi 
alone,  but  is  due  to  the  fact  that  a  "soulless  corpora- 
tion" in  the  possession  of  enormous  capital  was  di- 
rected by  men  who  were  able  to  see  the  possibilities 
of  Marconi's  invention,  which  as  yet  was  undemon- 
strated  from  a  practical  or  commercial  point  of  view. 

Remember,  it  is  always  the  individual  who  is  the 
pioneer  and  who  blazes  the  way  for  the  multitude.  All 
progress  has  been  through  these  individuals,  who  have 
had  the  vision  to  look  through  the  time-killing  methods 
of  their  day  and  the  courage  to  break  with  conven- 
tionality and  precedent,  and  to  use  their  newly  dis- 
covered ways  and  methods.  Only  by  the  preservation 


46  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

and  encouragement  of  individual  initiative  is  the  germ 
of  progress  kept  alive  or  induced  to  flourish.  Kill 
individual  initiative  and  all  progress  will  cease  and 
civilization  die. 

To  teach  men  that  the  ignorant  are  as  good  judges 
as  the  educated  or  that  the  ordinary  and  mediocre  are 
as  efficient  and  useful  as  the  extraordinary,  is  cruel 
because  it  is  so  utterly  false. 


CHAPTER  V 
THE  REWARD  OF  LABOR 

The  Laborer  is  Worthy  of  His  Hire— But  No  More 

[HE  incompetence  and  improvidence  of  the 
so-called  "laboring  classes"  has  never  been 
better  described  than  it  was  by  the  late 
David    Graham    Phillips,    who    certainly 
was  no  friend  of  capital. 

Phillips  said :  "The  art  of  living  is  divided  into  two 
totally  separate  and  independent  parts.  The  first,  the 
one  usually  regarded  as  the  whole  of  the  art,  is  how  to 
get  an  income ;  but  the  second,  which  consists  of  know- 
ing how  to  use  the  income,  is  totally  ignored." 

He  said :  "As  you  descend  the  scale  of  income,  the 
conditions  of  ignorance,  carelessness,  and  folly,  in 
spending  increase  and  their  consequences  become  ap- 
palling!" Beginning  with  the  foundation  of  living, 
Shelter,  he  says  that :  "The  better  class  of  tenants  who 
do  not  damage  property,  who  pay  promptly  and  remain 
for  long  periods,  are  able  to  get  their  housing  on  a 
basis  of  8  per  cent  on  the  sum  invested  in  housing 
them,  but  the  poorer  tenants  living  on  the  verge  of  ruin 
are  reckless  and  indifferent,  often  destructive  and 
troublesome,  irregular  and  uncertain,  and  landlords 
must  have  additional  compensation  for  dealing  with 
such  disagreeable  tenants.  The  result  is  that  this  class 

47 


48  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

of  the  poor  is  compelled  to  pay  for  their  housing  a 
sum  equal  to  20  per  cent  of  the  amount  necessary  to 
invest  in  housing  them." 

He  then  takes  up  the  question  of  Clothing,  and  says 
that:  "The  investment  in  good  clothes,  that  is,  good 
from  the  point  of  service,  calls  for  more  money  than 
the  average  poor  family  has  at  any  one  time.  If," 
he  says,  "the  poor  only  knew  they  would  contrive  some- 
how to  make  the  tremendous  sacrifices  necessary  to 
the  getting  of  good  quality  in  their  clothes.  It  is 
well  known  that  the  trade  of  the  poor  is  enormously 
lucrative.  Goods  for  them  are  made  to  catch  the  eye, 
the  untrained  eye,  which  is  unable  to  distinguish  shoddy 
from  real  quality:  no  substance,  no  warmth,  no  dura- 
bility. From  shoes  and  stockings  to  hats,  everything 
made  to  sell  to  the  poor,  is  rotten  with  sham  and 
shoddy,  for  the  shopkeeper  like  the  landlord  feels  that 
he  must  have  huge  profits  to  compensate  him  for  deal- 
ing with  such  customers." 

And  next,  the  item  of  Food.  "To  spend  an  hour  in 
a  grocery  store  or  meat  shop  in  the  poorer  quarter  of 
any  city  and  watch  the  women  and  children  buy  is  to 
have  the  heart  wrung.  Oh,  the  penalties  of  ignorance, 
the  dollar  so  hardly  earned — wasted,  or  worse  than 
wasted !  The  poor  as  a  rule  prefer  the  kinds  of  meat 
that  are  least  nourishing  and  hardest  to  digest.  The 
poor  do  not  buy  in  quantity  and  so  the  prices  are 
nominally  small  but  actually  enormous.  They  do  not 
buy  flour  for  they  have  neither  time  nor  place  to  make 
bread,  and  do  not  know  how  if  they  did.  They  do 
not  even  buy  meat  when  they  can  avoid  it,  for  they 


THE    REWARD    OF    LABOR  49 

have  no  facilities  for  cooking  it,  and  the  delicatessen 
shop  tempts  them  with  its  cooked  meats  at  prices  that 
seem  low.  They  buy  coffee  already  ground  at  a  price 
one-third  to  one-half  more  than  if  they  would  buy  it 
unground  and  grind  it  themselves.  The  poor  do  not 
know  the  thousand  tricks  of  the  seller  and  dealer. 
Lacking  all  facility  for  storing  and  preparing  food 
much  of  what  they  buy  is  spoilt  and  wasted,  and  finally 
the  item  of  Fuel." 

"The  poor  do  not  buy  by  the  ton  or  even  by  the  half- 
ton,  but  by  the  bag,  the  bushel,  the  pail,  and  thinking 
to  be  economical  they  buy  the  very  poorest  quality  of 
coal  and  pay  the  small  dealer,  who  delivers  it  to  them 
by  the  bag  or  pail,  at  a  rate  that  is  often  as  much  as 
300  per  cent  above  the  ton  price." 

This  is  a  distressing  picture,  but  it  is  worthy  of 
notice  that  the  whole  penalty  of  poverty,  to  which 
Phillips  calls  attention,  is  due  to  the  woeful  ignorance 
of  the  individuals,  who  suffer  so  as  the  result  of  their 
ignorance,  and  that  in  nothing  that  they  do  in  wasting 
their  money  do  the  rich  or  the  near-rich  profit. 

The  common  statement  made  by  those  who  attack 
wealth  that  the  rich  have  accumulated  their  wealth  by 
robbing  the  poor,  is  not  and  never  has  been  true. 
The  poor  never  produce  as  much  as  they  consume. 
That  is  the  reason  they  are  poor  and  have  nothing  of 
which  to  be  robbed.  While  wealth  is  the  surplus  pro- 
duct of  production  over  and  above  consumption. 

The  incompetence  of  labor  is  well  illustrated  by  the 
following  story,  told  by  President  Branson  of  the 
Georgia  State  Normal  School: 


50 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

"Near  the  school  was  a  tenant  farmer,  a  good  man, 
industrious,  law-abiding,  and  intensely  religious.  A 
tenant  farmer,  who  had  lived  for  years  and  years  upon 
the  same  farm,  which  happened  to  belong  to  a  Dutch 
Land  Company  that  was  desirous  of  closing  out  its 
business  in  the  State  of  Georgia.  They  offered  the 
farm  to  the  tenant  on  a  ten-year  loan  at  six  per  cent, 
and  although  his  sons  and  his  neighbors  begged  and 
pleaded  with  him  to  buy  this  farm  on  which  he  had 
lived  so  long,  upon  these  easy  terms,  he  absolutely  re- 
fused to  consider  the  proposition.  His  sons  then  per- 
suaded a  Macon  business  man  to  buy  the  farm  from 
the  Dutch  Company  on  the  same  terms  offered  to  their 
father  in  order  that  they  and  their  family  might  con- 
tinue to  live  on  the  place.  The  Macon  business  man 
paid  the  first  payment,  one-tenth  of  the  purchase  price 
out  of  his  business,  while  the  farmer  and  his  sons 
continued  to  pay  the  rent  of  the  farm  as  before,  with 
the  result  that  at  the  end  of  the  ten  years  the  tenant 
by  his  payment  of  the  rent  for  that  year  enabled  the 
Macon  business  man  to  pay  the  last  payment  on  the 
farm  to  the  Dutch  Company.  The  Macon  business 
man  now  owns  the  farm,  every  dollar  of  the  purchase 
price  of  which  has  been  paid  to  him  by  the  tenant- 
farmer  as  rent  for  living  on  it.  Without  knowing  it 
this  tenant-farmer  has  paid  for  the  land,  which  the 
Macon  business  man  owns,  simply  because  he  lacked 
the  foresight  and  initiative  of  ordinary  intelligence." 

Some  men  have  imagination,  vision,  initiative,  dar- 
ing, executive  ability,  call  it  what  you  will,  but  it  is 
that  which  leads  them  to  dare  and  to  do,  while  the 


THE    REWARD    OF    LABOR  51 

great  mass  of  men  refuse  to  do  anything  unless  some- 
body else  takes  the  responsibility  for  it.  The  greatest 
and  oldest  game  in  the  world  is  "Passing  the  buck." 

Wherever  you  go  you  will  find  two  classes  of  people, 
those  who  are  serving  and  those  who  are  being  served. 
There  is  just  one  reason  for  the  difference  between 
the  two  classes.  Those  who  are  being  served  either 
have  themselves  been  thrifty  and  saved  something,  or 
they  have  had  someone  before  them  who  has  been 
thrifty  and  saved  something,  while  those  who  serve 
have  never  saved  anything  nor  had  anyone  to  do  it  for 
them. 

If  the  five  per  cent  of  our  people  who  had  accumu- 
lated and  were  the  possessors  of  most  of  the  wealth 
in  this  country  had  not  saved  their  surplus  and  in  this 
manner  piled  up  the  wealth  that  made  it  possible  for 
us  to  spend  and  lend  forty  billion  dollars  in  winning 
the  war,  our  whole  population  would  have  been  en- 
slaved, and  most  if  not  all  of  the  laborers  who  are  now 
condemning  wealth  would  be  engaged  in  involuntary 
and  unpaid  work  for  the  German  armies.  It  is  a  ser- 
ious question  whether  thrift  can  be  nourished  and 
further  wealth  accumulated  for  the  protection  of  the 
race  unless  the  thrifty  and  the  industrious  are  relieved 
from  the  taxation,  forced  upon  them  by  the  demands  of 
labor,  which  has  destroyed  the  many  little  fortunes 
and  competencies  which  our  previous  American  policy 
has  encouraged  as  an  evidence  of  good  citizenship: 

The  injustice  and  uneconomic  character  of  the 
attacks  upon  wealth  have  been  proven  by  the  fact  that 
since  we  entered  the  war,  the  salvation  of  our  country, 


52  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

depending  upon  making  the  best  use  of  the  wealth 
of  the  country  and  of  the  things  created  by  and  repre- 
senting that  wealth,  has  required  of  the  Govern- 
ment the  suspension  of  practically  every  law  that  it 
had  previously  passed,  imposing  these  unjust  and  un- 
economic burdens  upon  wealth.  It  is  doubtful  if  the 
war  could  have  been  won  if  the  administration  had 
been  compelled  to  observe  the  laws  for  the  regulation 
of  wealth  that  it  had  passed  for  the  purpose  of  penal- 
izing and  plundering  the  private  owners  of  wealth. 

An  evening  paper,  in  a  recent  editorial,  works  up  a 
tremendous  amount  of  indignation  over  the  fact  that 
the  net  profits  of  the  packing  business  for  the  three 
years  of  1915-1916-1917  were  121  millions  more  than 
they  were  for  the  three  years  of  1912-1913-1914,  and 
declaims  against  the  cruel  process  by  which  the  meat 
packers  have  in  three  years  taken  121  million  dollars 
extra  toll  from  the  pressing  needs  of  the  nation  and 
people.  But  this  extra  toll,  which  it  denounces  as 
criminal,  amounts  to  only  40  million  dollars  a  year, 
and  is  a  bagatelle  compared  to  the  800  million  dollars 
wrung  from  the  pressing  needs  of  the  nation  and  of 
our  whole  people  by  the  labor  union  Railroad  Em- 
ployes, who  in  addition  to  wringing  this  enormous  sum 
from  the  pressing  needs  of  the  nation  and  people  are 
giving  them  a  rotten  and  inefficient  service  in  return, 
a  thing  which  cannot  be  charged  against  the  operators 
of  the  meat  packing  business. 

How  much  longer  are  our  people  going  to  stand  for 
the  demagoguery  and  deceit  that  are  being  practiced 
upon  them? 


THE    REWARD    OF    LABOR  53 

It  is  time  to  realize  that  there  is  no  double  standard 
of  morals  in  Government  any  more  than  there  is  in 
personal  relations !  If  a  practice  is  morally  wrong 
when  indulged  in  by  individuals,  it  is  morally  wrong 
when  indulged  in  by  the  Government  itself,  and  if  the 
Government  to  save  its  existence  is  compelled  to  adopt 
certain  practices  and  to  use  certain  devices,  and  finds 
that  in  so  doing  there  is  no  moral  turpitude,  it  cannot 
impute  moral  turpitude  and  criminality  to  individuals 
who  follow  the  same  practice. 

And  further,  what  is  wrong  toward  labor  is  equally 
wrong  toward  capital,  and  if  labor  can  show  that  it  is 
entitled  to  any  privilege,  certainly  surplus  or  accumu- 
lated labor  is  entitled  to  the  same  privilege  and  con- 
sideration, even  though  the  thriftless  laborer  may  call 
it  capital  or  wealth ! 

It  is  the  most  tragical  thing  about  the  career  of 
Colonel  Roosevelt  that  having,  while  Governor  of 
New  York,  induced  the  passage  of  two  of  the  most 
uneconomic  laws  attacking  wealth  ever  enacted;  and 
having  as  President  of  the  United  States  pursued  the 
attack  on  capital  and  big  business  by  instigating  the 
Northern  Securities  case  and  attemptng  to  enforce  the 
so-called  "Sherman  Anti-Trust  Law,"  and  pressing 
charges  against  the  railroads,  against  the  packing 
companies,  against  the  insurance  companies,  against  the 
Harvester  Trust  and  others,  he  lived  to  see  the  folly 
and  unsoundness  of  his  attitude  towards  business 
demonstrated,  and  saw  the  Government  compelled  to 
abandon  its  entire  program  and  reverse  its  whole  atti- 


54 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

tude  toward  wealth  and  big  business  in  order  to  save 
itself  and  our  people. 

While  President,  Colonel  Roosevelt  delivered  an 
address  before  the  students  at  Harvard,  in  which  he 
railed  at  the  men  who  did  not  do  real  work.  Astonish- 
ing! for  there  was  probably  no  man  who  ever  lived 
who  knew  less  than  Roosevelt  the  meaning  of  real 
work.  It  is  doubtful  if  he  ever  earned  a  dollar  in  his 
life  by  physical  toil  or  by  the  construction  of  anything. 
He  never  earned  a  dollar  in  his  life  in  commerce,  or 
business  of  any  kind,  and  dying,  there  is  not  a  spot 
on  the  earth  that  shows  a  dollar's  worth  of  improve- 
ment or  betterment  that  he  produced. 

Compare,  if  you  please,  the  record  of  his  life  with 
that  of  James  J.  Hill,  who  constructed  thousands  of 
miles  of  railroad  and  opened  up  millions  of  acres  of 
land  that  were  formerly  wild  and  inaccessible;  who 
bettered  the  conditions  and  raised  the  wages  of  hun- 
dreds of  thousands  of  men  and  women  by  the  oppor- 
tunities for  work  that  he  created.  Look  at  the  cities, 
whose  creation  and  growth  he  inspired,  and  the  wealth 
and  prosperity  of  a  half  dozen  states  which  his  vision 
conceived  and  which  his  work  made  possible. 

\Yhich  was  the  greater  worker,  a  Roosevelt  who 
railed  at  swollen  fortunes,  malefactors  of  great  wealth, 
and  who  sowed  discontent  and  envy  among  the  masses 
of  the  people,  or  a  Harriman,  who  took  the  bankrupt 
Pacific  railroads  off  the  hands  of  the  Government  and 
by  his  genius  for  management  and  development  not 
only  recreated  them  and  made  them  efficient  servitors 
of  the  states  through  which  they  ran,  but  by  improving 


THE    REWARD    OF    LABOR  55 

their  service  and  reducing  their  transportation  costs 
brought  prosperity  to  a  score  of  states  and  increased 
the  wealth  of  the  people  of  those  states,  which  were 
dependent  upon  them,  by  a  sum  not  less  than  25  billion 
dollars. 

The  fortune  that  Mr.  Harriman  left  is  a  mere  pit- 
tance compared  to  the  wealth  which  he  created  for 
others.  A  commission  so  small  when  expressed  in  per- 
centage of  the  money  that  he  made  for  others,  that  if 
the  ordinary  man  were  offered  business  on  the  same 
percentage  he  would  spurn  it  with  contempt. 

The  foresight  and  courage  of  Commodore  Vander- 
bilt  in  the  organization  and  consolidation  of  the  original 
scraps  of  road  and  in  the  construction  of  the  missing 
links  that  created  the  New  York  Central  &  Hudson 
River  system,  was  what  determined  the  leadership  and 
pre-eminence  of  the  State  of  New  York  in  population 
and  wealth  in  our  country.  Every  man  who  is  proud 
of  the  fact  that  the  Empire  State  is  the  first  state  of 
our  Union  in  population  and  wealth  owes  a  debt  of 
gratitude  to  old  Commodore  Vanderbilt.  The  paltry 
millions  that  fell  to  him  were  an  infinitesimal  part  of 
the  total  wealth  that  his  work  gave  to  this  state  and  its 
people. 

It  is  strange  that  President  Roosevelt,  having  de- 
voted his  entire  adult  life  to  criticizing  the  deeds  done 
by  the  doers  of  things,  should  have  advised  the  stu- 
dents of  Harvard  to  be  doers  rather  than  critics  of  the 
deeds  that  others  do.  The  doers  so  freely  criticized 
and  characterized  by  Roosevelt,  as  "malefactors  of 
great  wealth,"  "plunderers,"  "predatory  geniuses,"  etc., 


56  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

are  the  manufacturers  who  built  up  the  greatest 
plants  in  the  world ;  the  merchants  who  extended  the 
market  for  American-made  goods  to  the  uttermost 
limits  of  the  earth ;  the  builders  of  those  great  railroad 
systems  that  have  carried  the  products  of  American 
labor  to  market  at  the  smallest  cost  ever  paid  by  hu- 
man labor  to  deliver  its  products.  They  are  the  men 
who  went  into  the  desert  and  the  wilderness  and  there 
built  great  states  and  made  opportunities  for  millions 
of  men,  while  Roosevelt,  who  never  produced  a  dollar's 
worth  of  any  commodity  in  his  life,  secured  his  oppor- 
tunity to  become  the  President  of  this  great  people  by 
criticizing  and  leading  in  the  attack  upon  these  men 
who  had  done  these  wonderful  things. 

There  have  been  many  efforts  to  make  an  economic 
explanation  of  "the  panic  of  1907,"  but  none  can  be 
found  because  none  exists.  There  never  was  a  financial 
convulsion  in  the  history  of  the  world  that  was  so 
truly  a  panic  and  based  on  fear  alone  as  was  the  one 
of  1907.  It  was  due  solely  to  the  charge,  first  made 
by  Roosevelt,  that  all  great  bankers  and  business  men 
were  "malefactors  of  great  wealth."  His  cry  was  taken 
up  by  all  the  lesser  politicians  and  demagogues,  chat- 
tering the  Roosevelt  vocabulary  of  "plutocracy,"  "sor- 
did oppression,"  "crookedness,"  "unscrupulous,"  "dan- 
gerous," "criminal,"  etc.,  until  every  man  who  had  a 
dollar's  worth  of  anything  became  afraid  to  trust  any- 
body else  and  tried  to  liquidate  and  hide  hard  money  in 
his  fear. 

It  is  one  of  the  curious  things  in  connection  with 
the  attack  on  great  business  corporations  and  the 


THE    REWARD    OF    LABOR  57 

efficient  service  which  they  render  through  their  com- 
mand of  great  ability  and  large  capital,  that  they  re- 
duce prices.  Their  incompetent  and  inefficient  com- 
petitors always  claim  that  this  reduction  of  prices  is 
due  to  some  sort  of  secret  rebate,  or  is  a  deliberate 
underselling  to  force  them  out  of  business,  and  ignore, 
the  prime  economic  feature  of  the  whole  business* 
which  is  that  the  reduced  prices  inure  to  the  benefit 
of  the  mass  of  people  who  are  the  consumers  of  the 
product. 

It  is  strange  indeed  that  these  enemies  of  wealth  and 
efficiency  are  able  to  command  the  hearing  that  they  do 
when  the  thing  that  they  ask  is  that  people  shall  com- 
pel efficiency  and  capital  to  charge  a  higher  price  to 
consumers  than  is  economically  necessary  in  order  to 
give  their  inefficient  and  uneconomic  competitors  a 
chance  to  exist  at  the  expense  of  the  people,  who  would 
be  better  served  by  the  large  corporation  with  its  better 
product  produced  at  a  less  cost. 

Practically  every  law  that  has  been  passed  in  re- 
sponse to  popular  clamor  against  wealth  has  been  to 
declare  criminal  some  practice  that  was  economically 
sound  and  morally  just,  in  an  effort  to  handicap  the 
efficient  and  economical  business  operations  of  able  men 
and  give  the  incompetent,  the  little  and  the  mean,  an 
opportunity  to  live  off  of  the  necessities  of  the  poor. 
What  is  needed  is  not  a  reformation  of  business 
methods,  but  a  repeal  of  unjust  and  uneconomical  laws 
that  are  hindering  and  preventing  the  able  and  the 
efficient  from  giving  the  masses  of  the  people  the 
benefit  of  economic  production  and  cheap  distribution. 


58 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

The  legislation  which  has  prevented  this  and  kept 
alive  the  expensive,  inefficient  and  uneconomic  little 
business  men,  is  the  thing  which  above  everything  else 
has  raised  and  keeps  up  the  cost  of  living. 

Few  people  realize  how  the  great  developments 
which  have  made  possible  the  luxury  and  comfort  in 
which  they  are  living  are  due  not  only  to  the  existence 
of  wealth  but  to  the  courage,  foresight  and  real  benefi- 
cence of  wealth. 

Our  people  have  so  long  been  relieved  from  the 
primitive  methods  of  harvesting  and  are  so  ignorant  of 
the  use  of  the  hand-sickle,  or  of  the  flail,  or  of  the 
threshing  floor,  that  they  do  not  realize  how  much  of 
labor  has  been  saved  and  how  much  of  wealth  has  been 
created  for  the  farmers  by  the  invention  of  harvest- 
ing machinery. 

The  money  made  by  the  harvesting  companies  is  a 
small  percentage  of  what  their  devices  and  machinery 
have  saved  not  only  the  farmer  but  all  the  people  who 
consume  farm  products;  yet  our  people  have  been 
taught  that  the  International  Harvester  Company  is 
the  last  word  in  plundering  practice,  thievery,  and  un- 
fair tactics. 

Andrew  Carnegie,  in  his  "Gospel  of  Wealth,"  called 
attention  to  the  great  changes  in  the  standards  of  living 
brought  about  by  modern  manufacturing  methods 
based  on  the  use  of  great  capital.  In  the  primitive  days 
before  wealth  in  large  quantities  existed,  articles  were 
manufactured  at  the  domestic  hearth,  or  in  small  shops, 
which  formed  part  of  the  household.  The  master  and 
his  apprentices  worked  side  by  side.  The  apprentices 


THE    REWARD    OF    LABOR  59 

lived  with  the  master,  and  when  they  rose  to  be  masters 
in  their  turn,  there  was  little  or  no  change  in  their 
mode  of  life,  and  they  in  their  turn  educated  in  the 
same  routine,  their  apprentices. 

The  inevitable  result  of  such  a  method  of  manufac- 
ture was  crude  articles  at  high  prices  like  the  hand- 
made nail.  Today,  with  machines  made  possible  by 
wealth;  with  manufacture  in  quantity  made  possible 
by  large  capital,  the  world  obtains  commodities  of  ex- 
cellent quality  at  prices  which  even  the  generation  be- 
fore this  would  have  deemed  not  only  impossible  but 
unbelievable.  The  result  is  that  the  poor  today  enjoy 
what  the  rich  of  those  times  could  not  even  afford. 
The  luxuries  of  those  days  are  the  commonest  of  our 
necessities  today.  The  poorest  laborer  today  lives  with 
more  comforts  than  were  possible  for  the  richest  of 
men  a  hundred  years  ago.  The  advance  is  due  en- 
tirely to  accumulated  wealth  and  to  its  use  as  capital 
in  production,  and  he  would  be  indeed  a  foolish  stu- 
dent of  social  conditions  to  claim  that  the  masses  of  the 
race  have  not  benefited  thereby. 

The  real  truth  is  that  competition  as  we  know  it 
never  existed,  and  never  could  exist,  under  the  condi- 
tions that  prevailed  before  the  introduction  of  modern 
transportation  methods.  Each  community  was  more  or 
less  self-supporting  and  it  was  impossible  for  any  dis- 
tant iron  merchant  to  compete  with  the  local  black- 
smith, who  manufactured  such  iron  horseshoes  as 
were  necessary  for  his  local  customers,  but  with  the 
development  of  modern  transportation  along  with 
modern  industrial  efficiency,  true  competition  has  been 


60  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

developed.  Whether  the  law  of  competition  be  good 
or  evil,  it  is  here.  Evolution  is  competition !  We  must 
recognize  it  and  adapt  ourselves  to  it. 

It  is  idle  to  pretend  that  competition  can  be  pre- 
served in  some  things  and  eliminated  in  others.  In  an 
effort  to  preserve  competition,  our  laws  have  been 
drafted  to  prevent  combination  or  the  adoption  of  de- 
vices by  wealth  or  capital,  that  would  eliminate  com- 
petition, but  when  individual  men  or  bodies  of  men 
organized  into  labor  unions  find  themselves  compelled 
by  the  operation  of  the  same  law  to  work  at  high  ten- 
sion or  to  starve,  they  protest  bitterly  and  cry  out 
against  competitive  conditions,  and  endeavor  to  stop  the 
operation  of  this  natural  law.  The  law  of  competition 
may  seem  hard  or  cruel  in  its  operation  in  individual 
instances  yet  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  it  is  best  for 
the  race.  Labor  was  not  indulged  in  by  the  savage 
for  it  took  little  effort  to  satisfy  his  wants,  and  al- 
though we  have  traveled  far  from  savagery,  there  are 
still  but  few  individuals  among  few  races  who  have 
learned  to  work  voluntarily.  The  law  of  competition, 
therefore,  has  operated  and  will  operate  to  insure  the 
survival  of  those  who  have  best  developed  the  habits 
of  work. 

No  man  in  the  world  can  possibly  consume  all  that 
he  can  produce,  and  if  he  works  steadily  at  production 
he  is  bound  to  create  a  surplus.  The  only  thing  that 
prevents  any  man  from  piling  up  a  surplus  and  so 
accumulating  more  or  less  wealth  is  his  indisposition 
to  keep  up  effort  and  to  continue  work  wtien  his  con- 


THE    REWARD    OF    LABOR 61 

suming  power  is  satisfied,  or  to  take  care  of  his  surplus 
of  production  properly  when  it  is  created. 

Political  economists  pay  little  attention  to  one  of  the 
greatest  necessities  for  the  constant  production  of  sur- 
plus and  the  accumulation  of  wealth.  Much  of  what 
we  call  wealth  exists  in  the  buildings  and  improve- 
ments that  have  been  created  out  of  surplus  labor  in 
the  past,  but  these  buildings  rapidly  deteriorate  and 
depreciate  or  become  obsolete  and  unfit  for  the  loca- 
tion where  they  are,  and  must  be  destroyed  and  re- 
moved in  order  to  replace  them  with  better,  more 
modern  buildings  suited  for  the  needs  of  the  commun- 
ity. This  is  only  possible  by  the  constant  production 
of  surplus  wealth  to  cover  or  replace  the  wealth  rep- 
resented by  the  old  buildings  which  must  be  destroyed, 
and  to  provide  the  surplus  necessary  for  the  erection 
of  new.  This  constant  deterioration  and  wasting  away 
of  wealth  is  a  thing  which  has  been  given  little  notice, 
and  yet  it  is  true  that  there  are  not  over  two  or  three 
conspicuous  private  fortunes  in  the  world  today  over 
one  hundred  years  old. 

While  Mr.  Roosevelt  was  President,  he  proposed  to 
limit  the  size  of  inheritable  estates  and  to  make  it  im- 
possible for  men  of  wealth  to  leave  all  their  property 
to  their  wives  and  children,  a  strange  proposition  to 
come  from  one  who  inherited  the  fortune  that  enabled 
him  to  abstain  from  work  and  business  during  life  and 
devote  his  whole  time  to  politics  and  agitation.  The 
degree  of  his  sincerity  may  be  judged  from  the  fact 
that  his  will  did  not  contain  a  single  public  bequest 
but  gave  his  entire  fortune  to  his  wife  and  children, 


62 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

While  it  is  significant  that  the  chief  possessor  of  wealth 
who  died  the  same  year,  Mr.  Frick,  left  $100,000,000, 
or  four-fifths  of  his  fortune,  to  public  use  and  for 
public  benefit. 

Chief  Justice  Coleridge,  in  discussing  the  subject  of 
inheritance,  said:  "The  end  of  property  is  subsis- 
tence, by  which  end  nature  has  bounded  our  preten- 
sions to  it,  hence  in  a  state  of  nature  we  cannot  take 
more  than  we  use  nor  hold  it  longer  than  we  live  and 
are  capable  of  using  it.  The  manner  of  acquiring 
property  in  a  state  of  nature  is  by  taking  it  or  occupy- 
ing it.  All  other  modes  of  transmitting  or  acquiring 
property  are  acts  of  positive  and  civil  law,  which  laws 
prevent  the  property  of  the  dead  from  reverting  as  it 
otherwise  would  do  in  a  state  of  nature  to  the  common 
stock.  The  particular  rules  by  which  the  endowment 
of  property  is  regulated  differ  in  every  country  in  the 
world,  and  must  rest  at  last  upon  one  and  the  same 
foundation,  the  general  advantage.  All  laws  of 
property  must  stand  upon  the  fact  of  the  general  ad- 
vantage, for  a  country  belongs  to  its  inhabitants,  and 
in  what  proportions  and  by  what  rules  its  inhabitants 
are  to  occupy,  or  own  its  property,  must  be  settled  by 
the  laws  which  they  create." 

Justice  Coleridge's  remarks  on  the  subject  of  in- 
heritance are  just  as  far  as  he  goes,  but  he  neglected 
to  explain  why  the  laws  of  inheritance  have  been  so 
jealously  preserved.  In  primitive  society  the  property 
•of  the  dead  reverted  to  a  state  of  nature  and  became 
subject  to  seizure  by  the  strongest  surviving  individual 
in  the  immediate  vicinity  and  this  individual  upon  pos- 


THE    REWARD    OF    LABOR - 63 

sessing  himself  of  the  property  of  the  decedent  usually 
proceeded  at  once  to  exterminate  the  children  and 
family  of  the  man  who  had  just  died  in  order  to  pre- 
vent any  rival  claimant  to  the  property  growing  up. 
The  common  good,  therefore,  required  the  recognition 
of  the  rights  of  the  children  of  the  dead  to  their 
property  in  order  to  prevent  this  common  slaughter 
and  extermination  of  the  family  of  the  possessor  of 
property.  Surely  those  who  are  attacking  property 
and  the  rights  of  inheritance  do  not  wish  to  bring  back 
the  primitive  conditions  that  prevailed  before  the 
rights  of  inheritance  were  recognized. 

There  is  no  such  thing  as  dishonest  wealth.  All 
wealth  must  have  been  honestly  created  originally.  If 
it  is  in  the  hands  of  one  who  does  not  deserve  it,  it 
can  only  have  reached  there  in  a  distinct  way.  One 
can  steal  that  which  another  has  produced  but  the 
world  has  always  recognized  thievery  and  punished  it. 
The  producer  of  wealth  may  have  a  gambler's  in- 
stinct and  risk  it  in  a  gambling  venture,  as  so  many  do, 
but  it  is  impossible  to  denounce  the  winner  in  a  gam- 
bling proposition  and  excuse  the  loser.  The  producer  of 
wealth  may  be,  as  he  often  is,  a  spendthrift  in  which 
case  he  squanders  it,  or  he  may  be  incompetent  in  the 
matter  of  management  and  care  or  conservation,  in 
which  case  he  wastes  it. 

The  existence  of  so  many  millionaires  is  in  itself  evi- 
dence of  the  extreme  carelessness  and  improvidence 
of  the  mass  of  mankind.  For  if  they  were  careful  and 
thrifty  and  saved  the  surpluses  that  they  make  there 
would  not  be  so  much  wealth  scattered  around  for  the 


64 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

tireless  gleaners  or  the  industrious  scavengers  to 
^gather  up.  Remember  the  fortunes  made  out  of  the 
garbage  business! 

Lyman  Abbott  once  told  of  a  man  who  put  $60,000 
into  a  gold  mine  and  in  two  years  without  doing  a 
stroke  of  work  or  using  his  brain  took  out  $2,000,000. 
This,  he  declared,  was  not  just  and  that  society  was 
going  to  change  the  conditions  that  made  such  a  thing 
possible.  Fortunately  for  Dr.  Abbott  he  does  not  claim 
that  the  man  who  had  the  $60,000  did  not  use  his 
brain  in  accumulating  the  $60,000,  but  he  entirely 
overlooks  the  fact  that  no  laborer  dependent  on  his 
labor  alone  could  have  undertaken  the  work  of  digging 
for  this  gold.  If  somebody  had  not  accumulated  $60,- 
000  to  support  labor  while  it  prospected  and  hunted, 
this  particular  block  of  gold  would  never  have  been 
found,  and  as  for  the  return,  the  Doctor  ignores  en- 
tirely the  fact  that  the  labor  that  prospected  and  hunted 
was  supported  and  fed  and  clothed  while  it  so  hunted 
and  dug,  regardless  of  whether  the  gold  had  been 
found  or  not,  and  that  if  the  gold  had  not  been  found, 
then  labor  would  have  turned  to  other  work,  not  only 
no  poorer  by  reason  of  the  failure  of  its  search  but 
just  as  well  if  not  better  off  than  it  had  been  before, 
while  the  thrifty  man  who  had  saved  up  the  $60,000 
and  paid  it  to  labor  would  have  lost  it  all. 

Jt  is  common  to  denounce  the  possessors  of  wealth 
gotten  by  the  discovery  of  mines  or  oils  and  similar 
hidden  things,  but  the  search  for  hidden  mineral 
wealth  is  open  to  everyone  and  is  even  more  hazardous 
and  uncertain  in  its  return  than  is  the  search  for  game. 


THE    REWARD    OF    LABOR 65 

No  one  can  engage  in  this  hazardous  search,  uncertain 
of  return,  except  one  who  has  by  extra  effort  thereto- 
fore accumulated  a  sufficient  surplus  to  support  him 
while  he  engages  in  this  hazard,  which  may  take  him 
such  a  time  as  may  compel  him  to  consume  his  sur- 
plus and  may  have  found  him  nothing  when  that  sur- 
plus has  been  consumed  and  spent.  Few  are  willing 
to  take  this  hazard,  and  yet  the  hidden  mineral  wealth 
when  found  is  for  the  benefit  of  all  users  thereof.  It 
is,  therefore,  ethical,  right  and  just  that  the  individuals 
who  are  willing  to  spend  their  accumulated  surplus  in 
the  search  shall  receive  profits  in  proportion  to  the 
hazards  which  they  have  taken.  Besides  it  is  not  they 
who  put  the  price  on  the  stuff  found  but  the  millions 
who  refuse  to  take  part  in  the  search  for  it.  It  is  al- 
ways capital,  even  though  it  be  small,  that  must  take 
this  hazard.  Labor  never  hazards  anything  in  such  a 
search,  for  labor  has  nothing  to  hazard. 

All  these  preachers  in  favor  of  a  "fairer  distribu- 
tion of  wealth"  or  a  more  even  distribution  of  wealth, 
fail  to  show  where  the  justice  or  equity  is  in  taking 
surplus  production  from  the  man  who  works  to  produce 
it  and  dividing  it  with  the  man  who  went  fishing  or 
swimming  while  the  other  fellow  worked.  But  above 
all,  these  preachers  for  "equitable  division  of  wealth" 
and  property  ignore  the  moral  effect  upon  the  man 
who  receives  that  which  he  knows  is  the  product  of 
another's  labor,  industry  or  thrift  and  which  he  also 
knows  to  be  something  toward  the  production  of 
which  he  has  contributed  absolutely  nothing. 


66 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

President  Elliott  of  Harvard  declaims  with  great 
force  against  "the  abuse  of  great  salaries  in  corpora- 
tions," and  declares  that  the  huge  salaries  of  recent 
times  enormously  overpay  their  recipients,  and  he  in- 
sists that  the  exaggerated  salary  is  not  really  neces- 
sary either  to  get  or  to  keep  the  best  men. 

In  a  corporation  of  which  I  have  knowledge,  a  Vice- 
President  drawing  a  salary  of  thirty  thousand  dollars 
a  year,  devised  a  new  method  of  handling  his  com- 
pany's business  that  saved  them  six  hundred  thousand 
dollars  in  a  single  year.  By  his  single  device  he  saved 
that  company  enough  to  pay  the  entire  cost  of  his 
services  for  twenty  years,  and  no  one  can  tell  what  he 
will  yet  be  worth  to  the  company  in  the  future.  The 
truth  is  that  this  man  is  not  being  paid  for  his  services 
at  all  but  he  is  actually  paying  95  per  cent  of  what  he 
earns  to  the  corporation  for  the  privilege  of  serving  it, 
and  this  is  far  less  rather  than  more  than  what  most 
men  of  brains  pay  to  the  mediocre  mass  of  mankind 
for  the  privilege  of  serving  the  ignorant  and  un- 
appreciative  people,  who  declaim  against  them. 

One  of  the  great  insurance  companies,  that  has  for 
years  kept  a  record  of  dishonesty  and  breach  of  faith 
in  business,  has  called  attention  repeatedly  in  recent 
years  to  the  enormous  growth  of  dishonesty  among  the 
masses  of  the  people.  It  does  not  pretend  to  give  a 
reason  for  this  growth  of  dishonesty,  but  there  can  be 
no  doubt  that  it  is  largely,  if  not  entirely,  due  to  the 
constant  preaching  of  inequity,  to  a  general  repudiation 
on  the  part  of  the  mass,  of  the  property  rights  of  the 
thrifty  and  saving  in  the  product  of  their  thrift  and  to 


THE    REWARD    OF    LABOR  67 

the  inculcation  of  the  theory  that  what  belongs  to  cor- 
porations or  institutions  belongs  to  anybody,  and  that 
the  thief  in  stealing  from  them  is  merely  taking  back 
a  part  of  what  belongs  to  him. 

What  can  you  expect  of  the  ignorant  masses  of 
people,  when  the  Chief  Executive  of  the  Nation  makes 
such  a  statement  as  this : 

"They  grew  richer  and  richer  until  it  became  a 

national  scandal." 

Are  the  masses  of  the  people  to  be  encouraged  to 
thrift  and  persuaded  to  save  a  competence  for  their  old 
age  if  it  is  a  scandal  to  grow  rich? 

Senator  Tillman,  after  spending  most  of  his  life  in 
attacking  wealth,  in  his  old  age  realized  his  mistake, 
and  in  one  of  his  last  speeches,  said : 

"Men  with  means  have  their  place  in  the  scheme  of 
civilization,  let  them  spend  their  money  for  works  of 
art  and  bring  them  into  this  country  free  that  they 
may  be  an  inspiration  to  our  own  artists.  If  there 
were  no  inequalities  of  wealth  we  would  have  no  pal- 
aces, no  art,  no  progress,  no  civilization.  Equality  is 
found  only  among  savages." 

Even  William  J.  Bryan  has  seen  a  light.  At  a  re- 
cent meeting  of  laboring  men  he  said :  "The  reward  of 
labor  is  increased  by  the  man  of  executive  ability.  I 
recognize  that  there  is  a  talent  that  may  be  called 
'executive  talent,'  and  that  it  is  highly  useful  in  the  or- 
ganization of  industry,  and  it  is  entitled  to  its  just  re- 
ward. What  is  left  over  for  labor  is  larger  than  what 
would  be  left  if  industry  were  not  organized." 


68 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

The  talent  for  organization  and  management  is  so 
rare  that  its  possessor  invariably  secures  enormous  re- 
wards no  matter  where  he  lives  or  under  what  laws 
or  conditions  he  works. 

As  Andrew  Carnegie  well  said:  "The  ability  of  a 
man,  whose  services  can  be  obtained  as  a  partner,  is  not 
only  the  first  consideration,  but  is  such  a  consideration 
that  if  he  have  the  ability,  his  lack  of  capital  is  scarcely 
worth  considering.  For  a  man  with  ability  soon  cre- 
ates capital,  but  without  the  special  talent  required, 
the  capital  invested  behind  him  soon  takes  wings." 

The  dissolution  of  several  of  our  great  corporations 
has  in  each  instance  resulted  in  the  dissolution  of  a 
more  or  less  efficient  organization,  and  has  therefore 
resulted  not  only  in  an  economic  loss  to  the  community 
but  has  put  an  added  burden  of  cost  on  the  mass  of 
people  who  had  been  and  are  users  and  consumers  of 
their  products. 

The  Standard  Oil  Company  was  compelled,  in  re- 
sponse to  popular  clamor,  to  dissolve  into  its  original 
twenty  or  more  constituent  parts  and  so  forced  by 
law  to  impose  a  score  of  overhead  charges  upon  the 
public  instead  of  one,  with  the  result  that  what  con- 
stituted a  single  share  in  the  original  trust  and  sold 
for  only  $600,  rose  in  earning  power  so  that  the 
twenty  scraps  sold  for  over  $2,000.  If  the  Standard 
Oil  Company  had  done  this  of  its  own  motion  it  would 
have  been  charged  with  watering  its  stock. 

It  would  be  amusing  if  it  did  not  display  such  piti- 
able lack  of  economic  understanding  to  analyze  the 


THE    REWARD    OF    LABOR 69 

many  wild  attacks  upon  capital  and  wealth  and  the  use 
of  corporations,  on  the  score  of  alleged  stock  watering. 

There  is  not  and  never  has  been  such  a  thing  as 
watering  stock.  It  is  absolutely  and  utterly  impos- 
sible. 

A  Chinese  Emperor  finding  that  people  were  hoard- 
ing the  precious  metals,  took  iron  and  cast  it  into  large 
disks,  which  he  stamped  with  the  denomination  of  100 
cash,  but  the  soldiers,  whom  he  paid  with  this  currency 
threw  it  away  in  derision,  knowing  that  it  was  prac- 
tically worthless.  The  Imperial  stamp  declaring  it  to 
be  worth  100  cash  did  not  deceive  anyone  for  a 
minute.  A  later  Emperor  hoping  to  escape  the  ex- 
perience of  this  one,  took  copper  and  casting  it  in  the 
form  of  money  stamped  it  as  of  the  denomination  of 
10  cash,  but  the  people  were  undeceived  by  the  attempt 
of  their  Emperor  to  "water"  the  coinage.  Recognizing 
the  value  of  the  copper  they  weighed  it,  found  it  to  be 
worth  intrinsically  two  cash,  and  thereafter  all  ten  cash 
pieces  circulated  as  of  the  value  of  two  cash  each.  So 
it  was  that  although  they  bore  the  denomination  of  ten 
cash,  still  when  a  merchant  asked  you  10  cash  for  a  cake 
he  received  from  you  not  one  of  these  copper  pieces 
but  five.  English  kings  had  the  same  experience  with 
their  coinage  as  did  the  Chinese  emperors,  and  modern 
corporation  organizers  and  financiers  have  had  exactly 
the  same  experience  with  their  corporate  shares. 

When  the  Steel  Corporation  was  organized  the  great 
banking  house  of  Morgan  issued  shares  that  bore  on 
their  face  a  certificate  that  they  were  of  a  denomination 
of  $100  each,  but  not  one  soul  in  the  world  was  de- 


70 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

ceived  thereby.  The  public  recognized  the  speculative 
character  thereof  and  expressed  its  hope  that  efficient 
management  and  economic  operation  might  give  them 
some  value.  It  therefore  purchased  a  few  at  about 
30  cents  on  the  dollar,  then  deciding  that  its  hopes  were 
too  remote  of  attainment,  refused  to  accept  the  shares 
even  at  this  valuation,  and  they  repeatedly  depreciated 
in  public  estimation  until  they  reached  a  quotation  of 
$8  for  a  $100  share,  or  about  one-twelfth  of  the  ficti- 
tious denomination. 

At  this  price,  which  was  all  that  the  promoters  could 
get  for  them,  if  they  attempted  to  sell,  there  was  little 
if  any  "water,"  and  if  the  price  of  these  shares  has 
since  approached,  or  exceeded,  the  denomination 
originally  stamped  upon  them  by  the  organizers  and 
promoters  of  the  Steel  Corporation  it  is  because  twenty 
years  of  hard  work,  efficient  management  and  re-in- 
vestment in  the  business  of  the  surplus  earnings, 
created  not  "water"  but  actual  property  of  an  intrinsic 
value  greater  than  the  price  at  which  the  shares  are 
now  quoted.  This  is  because  the  public,  while  recog- 
nizing the  existence  of  property  equal  to  or  in  excess 
of  the  par  value  of  the  shares,  doubts  the  ability  of  its 
management,  though  known  to  be  honest  and  efficient, 
to  continue  earnings  in  the  face  of  economic  conditions 
that  threaten  the  possible  market  for  its  products. 

And  this  is  true  of  the  shares  of  every  company  ever 
organized,  promoted,  and  financed,  where  its  shares 
have  been  sold  to  the  public.  The  people  have  always 
ignored  the  denomination  of  the  shares,  or  its  nominal 
capitalization,  and  has  expressed  its  opinion  of  the 


THE    REWARD    OF    LABOR 71 

real  values  by  the  price  it  has  been  willing  to  pay  for 
the  shares.  This  being  true,  it  is  idle  to  pretend  that 
the  denomination  printed  on  a  share  certificate,  in 
anywise  deceives  anyone,  or  is  any  possible  offense, 
social  or  ethical,  against  government  or  people. 

The  payment  in  full  in  cash  for  a  stock,  which  is 
asked  for  by  these  ignorant  social  economists,  is  no 
insurance  either  of  values  or  of  prosperity,  for  financial 
history  is  full  of  the  cases  of  corporations,  whose 
shares  have  been  paid  for  in  cash  in  full,  that  lost  their 
money,  spent  it  in  useless  development,  and  which  sell 
today  at  a  bare  fraction  of  the  actual  cash  par  paid  in 
therefor,  while  literally  thousands  of  such  companies 
have  lost  all  their  money  and  gone  bankrupt. 

Yet,  if  there  were  any  merit  in  the  argument  against 
so-called  "stock  watering,"  the  people  ought  in  some 
way  to  have  been  protected  when  they  invested  in  the 
shares  of  a  company  that  had  actually  had  $100  in 
cash  paid  in  for  every  $100  cash  certificate  issued, 
but  the  whole  world  knows  that  this  is  not  so,  and 
furthermore,  that  it  is  impossible  to  make  it  so.  How 
do  you  suppose  the  public  determines  the  value  of 
these  new  stock  shares  issued  without  dollar  denomina- 
tion? It  makes  such  valuation  as  it  can  of  the  actual 
property  held  by  the  company,  adds  a  little  to  this  or 
deducts  some  according  to  its  judgment  of  the 
promoters  and  managers  and  divides  the  result  by  the 
number  of  shares. 

Socialists  and  political  philosophers  talk  of  un- 
earned increment  as  tho  it  were  peculiar  only  to  the 
increase  in  the  value  of  land.  They  ignore  the  fact 


72  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

that  the  principle  which  adds  to  land  that  value  which 
they  call  unearned  increment  operates  in  every  branch 
of  human  endeavor.  The  growth  of  population  which 
adds  an  unearned  increment  to  land  makes  possible  an 
increased  circulation  for  a  newspaper  and  so  adds  to 
the  unearned  increment  of  the  publisher.  It  adds  to  the 
trade  of  the  corner  grocer  and  so  adds  to  his  unearned 
increment  and  makes  the  corner  location  so  desirable 
that  other  grocers  down  the  block  bid  high  for  the 
corner  location.  This  same  influx  of  population  in- 
creases the  demand  for  trucking,  and  so  adds  to  the 
unearned  increment  of  the  owner  of  trucks.  It  adds 
to  the  demand  for  housing  and  so  adds  to  the  business 
and  the  unearned  increment  of  the  dealer  in  lumber 
and  brick  and  other  building  materials.  And  lastly, 
by  the  increased  demand  for  houses  it  increases  the 
demand  for  labor,  raises  wages  and  adds  to  the  un- 
earned increment  of  the  laborer.  The  truth  is  that 
there  is  no  such  thing  as  "unearned  increment."  The 
term  should  be  driven  from  economic  discussion  and  it 
should  be  finally  recognized  that  any  change  for  the 
better  in  the  condition  of  a  community,  adds  to  the 
value  of  whatever  any  inhabitant  of  the  community  has 
to  sell,  whether  it  be  land  or  trade  or  labor. 

William  Jennings  Bryan,  in  an  address  to  the  stu- 
dents of  the  University  of  Pennsylvania,  declared  that : 
"No  individual  or  corporation  has  a  right  to  accumu- 
late more  than  a  fair  return  for  services  rendered  to 
society.  There  should  be  a  code  of  laws,"  said  Mr. 
Bryan,  "for  the  regulation  of  wealth  which  would  put 
an  end  to  the  power  of  the  individual  to  accumulate 


THE    REWARD    OF    LABOR 73 

vast  sums  of  money.  A  man  can  rightfully  collect  from 
society  no  more  than  he  honestly  earns  and  the  amount 
he  can  honestly  earn  is  not  more  than  what  fairly 
measures  the  value  of  the  services  he  does  for  society." 

Yes,  but  can  anyone  estimate  the  value  of  the  serv- 
ices rendered  to  society,  to  the  world  and  the  billion 
and  a  half  people  in  it,  of  Mr.  Rockefeller,  who  by 
making  safe  and  cheap  the  use  of  petroleum  and  by 
building  up  an  economical  system  of  distribution  has 
spread  the  use  of  illuminants  throughout  the  world, 
turned  the  night  into  day,  banished  ignorance  and 
superstition,  and  done  more  to  make  possible  reading 
and  study,  and  the  spread  of  education  and  culture, 
than  all  the  men  who  lived  in  the  world  before  his 
time?  Who  can  measure  the  value  of  the  services  to 
mankind  of  Thomas  Edison,  with  his  many  inventions  ? 
Or  a  Philip  D.  Armour,  who  by  the  development  of 
refrigeration  and  cold  storage,  has  brought  within  the 
reach  of  the  poorest  in  the  land,  a  quality  of  meat  that 
was  not  only  out  of  the  reach  of  the  richest  but  was 
absolutely  unknown  until  he  introduced  his  methods 
into  the  packing  house  business?  Or  who  shall  say 
what  it  was  worth  to  the  world  to  discover  the  method 
of  refining  sugar,  that  reduced  it  from  its  original 
cost  of  25  cents  or  a  shilling  a  pound,  when  that  rep- 
resented a  day's  work,  to  its  recent  price  of  5  cents 
a  pound,  which  in  our  country  at  least  is  not  over  one- 
one-hundredth  of  the  wages  for  a  day  ? 

If  it  is  right  for  labor  to  demand  and  get  as  much  as 
it  can  for  its  work,  is  it  not  equally  right  for  the  man 
of  brains  to  demand  and  get  as  much  as  he  can  for  his 


74  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

thought,  or  his  invention,  or  his  device;  and  is  it  not 
equally  right  fort  the  man  who  has  accumulated  a  sur- 
plus, either  by  work  or  by  his  thought,  to  demand  and 
get  as  large  a  share  as  possible  in  the  joint  product  of 
his  surplus  and  the  work  of  those,  who  appeal  to  him 
for  support  out  of  his  surplus,  while  they  labor  to  pro- 
duce some  thing  of  extraordinary  value  that  could  not 
and  cannot  be  produced  unless  labor  is  supported  dur- 
ing the  long  or  difficult  task  of  production  ?  The  same 
morality  covers  them  all.  And,  if  ignorant  labor  scat- 
ters and  wastes  its  surplus  production,  is  it  immoral  or 
criminal  for  intelligent  thrift  to  glean  and  gather  what 
would  otherwise  be  lost? 


CHAPTER  VI 
THE  CRITICS  OF  WEALTH 

You  Cant  Eat  It  Up,  or  Drink  It  Up  Without  Killing 
Yourself 

|AMUEL  J.  TILDEN,  presiding  at  a  dinner 
given  in  1877  to  J.  S.  Morgan,  grandfather 
of  the  present  J.  P.  Morgan,  and  propos- 
ing the  health  of  the  great  banker,  who 
founded  this  house,  said : 

"Every  man,  who  by  any  effort  reduces  the  cost  or 
increases  the  output  of  any  services  demanded  by  so- 
ciety, to  that  extent  enlarges  the  productive  capacity  of 
human  labor  and  increases  the  result  of  its  exercise. 
These  men  whom  we  see  around  us,  the  owners  and 
manufacturers  of  colossal  capital,  associated  together 
in  great  corporations,  undoubtedly  have  an  illusion, 
at  least  some  of  them  have,  that  they  are  working  for 
themselves,  but  I  have  the  satisfaction  of  knowing  that 
they  are  chiefly  working  for  their  corporations  and  for 
their  stockholders,  but  I,  on  behalf  of  the  public, 
assert  that  in  the  main  they  have  worked  and  are 
working  for  the  public.  While  we  see  these  men  with 
colossal  fortunes  and  managers  of  great  associated 
capital,  seeking  to  all  human  eyes  their  own  selfish  gain, 
there  is  a  wise  and  beneficent  overruling  providence 
which  directs  events  so  that  nearly  all  they  do  in  lessen- 

75 


76 A_DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

ing  the  costs  of  these  services  results  not  in  enlarged 
profits  to  their  companies  and  to  themselves  but  in 
diminishing  charges  and  so  inures  to  the  benefit  of  the 
masses  of  the  people.  It  is  not  possible  under  natural 
laws  that  any  but  a  comparatively  inconsiderable  share 
of  the  results  of  their  planning,  their  efforts,  their 
skill  and  their  sacrifices,  shall  go  anywhere  else  than  to 
the  benefaction  of  the  general  public.  And  even  this 
comparatively  small  share  which  those  who  do  the 
transportation  for  human  society  are  able  to  receive 
as  profits,  so  long  as  it  is  invested  as  active  capital 
for  doing  the  necessary  and  essential  services  in  the 
work  of  transportation  or  otherwise,  is  by  creating 
better  machinery,  better  processes,  and  wider  competi- 
tion, all  resulting  in  cheaper  service  to  the  public. 
When  we  come  to  the  small  fraction  which  the  owners 
or  managers  of  these  great  capitals  are  able  to  apply 
to  their  personal  use,  or  to  lay  up  for  such  use,  the 
first  thing  that  strikes  one  is  that  they  cannot  even 
carry  a  carpet  bag  on  their  long  journey  to  that  bourne 
from  which  no  traveler  returns.  Even  these  small 
fractions  which  they  accumulate,  after  their  owners 
have  left  them,  sink  into  the  mass  which  society  in  the 
aggregate  owns  and  undergoes  a  fresh  distribution." 
It  is  difficult  to  see  how  a  man,  who  was  so  great  a 
statesman  and  so  sound  an  economist,  failed  of  election 
to  the  Presidency  of  the  United  States. 

Illustrating  this  point,  is  a  recent  figure  used  by  the 
late  James  J.  Hill,  who  said :  "The  law-making  au- 
thority has  fluttered  about  the  natural  and  necessary 
transportation  much  as  a  fly  buzzes  about  a  horse. 


THE    CRITICS    OF    WEALTH 77 

It  may  sting  and  annoy  but  it  never  hastens  nor  im- 
pedes the  progress  of  the  horse  unless  the  flies  become 
thick  enough  and  bite  hard  enough  to  bring  him  to  a 
halt  in  the  effort  to  drive  them  away." 

This  is  exactly  what  has  happened  in  the  railroad 
situation.  The  horse,  which  though  irritated  for  years 
by  the  biting  of  the  legislative  flies,  has  continued  pull- 
ing his  load,  has  finally  found  the  flies  so  thick 
that  it  has  been  compelled  to  stop  and  bite  and  kick 
the  pests  which!  refuse  to  be  switched  off  with  its  tail. 
The  people  who  have  been  applauding  the  buzzing  of 
the  flies,  may  now  decide  how  they  like  the  service 
of  transportation  produced  thereby. 
— Eh^Josiah_Sirong,  in  one  of  his  addresses,  stated 
that :  "For  twenty  years  the  church  had  deplored  the 
fact  that  workingmen  as  a  class  refused  to  attend  the 
church,  and  claimed  that  it  was  because  the  working- 
men  felt  that  the  church  belonged  to  the  capitalistic 
class."  The  truth  is  that  the  laboring  class  as  a  rule 
are  too  ignorant  to  understand  a  spiritual  truth  or  to 
respond  to  a  religious  appeal.  They  are  too  much 
interested  in  the  questions  of  food  and  drink  and  the 
satisfaction  of  primitive  appetites,  to  understand  or  to 
have  any  interest  in  spiritual  things.  Then  too,  the 
working  man  as  a  rule  is  unable  to  see  the  use  or 
benefit  of  churches  and  not  only  refuses  to  give  up  any 
of  what  he  calls  his  "hard-earned  cash"  to  churches 
but  he  refuses  to  go  to  church  or  attend  a  service 
where  he  is  asked  to  give  up  anything.  Only  the 
Catholic  Church  by  keeping  itself  on  the  mental  level 
of  the  ordinary  working  man  has  been  able  by  taking 


78  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

advantage  of  his  ignorance  and  superstition  to  hold 
some  of  the  workingman's  interest  and  allegiance  and 
thru  fear  to  force  from  him  some  small  part  of  his 
earnings,  in  an  effort  to  propitiate  the  forces  that  he  is 
unable  to  understand. 

A  prominent  Catholic  clergyman  recently  declared 
that :  "If  employers  were  animated  with  the  spirit  of 
Christian  love,  labor  would  be  satisfied  with  the 
conditions  under  which  it  worked."  It  is  difficult  to 
see  on  what  the  Reverend  Gentleman  based  this  re- 
markable statement.  He  neglects  to  say  how  this  love 
is  to  be  exhibited — should  the  employer  encourage 
labor  to  work  more  or  harder  or  more  honestly  and 
efficiently  or  does  he  mean  that  the  employer  should 
voluntarily  give  to  labor  more  than  it  earns  and  so 
encourage  it  to  work  less? 

Economic  history  is  full  of  the  record  of  the  experi- 
ments made  by  employers  to  increase  the  output  and 
efficiency  of  labor,  but  these  efforts  unless  based  on  the 
demand  that  labor  shall  work  and  deliver  the  goods 
or  starve  have  invariably  failed.  In  Mexico,  American 
employers  doubled  and  trebled  the  wages  paid  to  Mexi- 
can labor  by  their  Mexican  and  Spanish  employers  in 
the  hope  and  expectation  that  they  would  get  better 
work  and  more  continuous  work,  but  the  result  has 
only  been  to  enable  the  Mexican  laborer  to  earn  as 
much  in  two  or  three  days  as  he  formerly  earned  in 
six,  so  that  when  he  had  worked  but  two  or  three  days 
he  invariably  quit  work  for  the  rest  of  the  week  to 
spend  his  earnings.  Exactly  the  same  experience  has 
been  that  of  employers  of  negro  labor  in  the  South,  and 


THE    CRITICS    OF    WEALTH 79 

it  is  a  notorious  fact  that  during  the  recent  war  the 
raising  of  wages  in  an  effort  to  get  increased  efficiency 
and  output  only  resulted  in  lowering  efficiency  and 
output  and  compelling  high-paid  laborers  to  take  two 
or  three  days  off  from  their  work  every  week  in  order 
to  spend  their  money. 

A  student  of  this  question  investigated  the  results  of 
Henry  Ford's  minimum  $5-a-day  wage  at  his  auto- 
mobile plant,  and  reported  that  the  result  had  not  been 
any  increase  of  efficiency  or  output  but  only  an  increase 
of  spending  and  dissipation. 

The  reports  of  the  insurance  companies  indicate  that 
less  than  4  per  cent  of  all  the  persons  dying  have 
accumulated  sufficient  surplus  to  leave  anything  large 
enough  to  be  considered  an  estate  or  to  demand  ad- 
ministration or  legal  attention.  It  is  also  a  significant 
fact  that  certain  statistics  show  that  about  four  or  five 
per  cent  of  our  population  are  owners  or  holders  of 
shares  of  the  corporations  of  this  country.  In  other 
words,  practically  every  person,  who  has  accumulated 
any  property  at  all  is  a  partner  in  some  one  of  the 
business  or  utility  corporations  of  the  United  States, 
and  an  attack,  therefore,  on  our  corporations  is  an  at- 
tack on  every  individual  who  has  been  thrifty  enough 
to  accumulate  any  surplus  above  what  he  has  been  com- 
pelled to  spend  in  living. 

The  laborer,  who  must  feed  himself  each  day  with 
the  product  of  that  day's  work,  cannot  undertake  a 
labor  the  returns  from  which  can  only  be  reaped  in  the 
future.  It  is  only  the  man  who  has  accumulated  a 


80  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

surplus  large  enough  to  keep  him  through  a  year,  who 
can  plant  and  sow  and  wait  for  the  harvest. 

It  was  not  until  some  men  had  accumulated  surplus 
enough  not  only  to  support  themselves  but  to  support 
many  of  those  laborers,  who  live  from  hand  to  mouth, 
for  a  year  or  for  several  years  that  mankind  was 
able  to  attempt  and  to  carry  out  those  great  works  that 
now  remain  to  us  as  monuments  of  human  industry. 
Without  the  thrift  and  foresight  of  such  individuals 
to  accumulate  such  surpluses  of  supplies,  we  would  be 
without  those  great  works  like  the  Pyramids,  the 
Tombs,  and  Reservoirs  of  the  Nile,  the  Irrigation  Sys- 
tems of  India,  the  Canals  and  Walls  of  China,  and  all 
those  things  that  have  done  so  much  to  make  habitable 
the  inhospitable  parts  of  the  earth  and  to  lighten  the 
burden  of  living  for  millions  of  mankind. 

When  the  great  tunnel  through  Storm  King  Moun- 
tain and  under  the  Hudson  was  being  constructed  in 
order  to  bring  a  pure  water  supply  into  New  York 
City,  an  irresponsible  newspaper  man  was  sent  up  to 
write  a  story  of  the  work.  He  was  taken  down  in  the 
tunnel  and  shown  the  men  at  work,  and  when  he  came 
out,  irresponsible  as  he  was,  his  story  recorded  a  most 
extraordinary  impression,  which  I  shall  give  in  his  own 
language : 

"It  was  curious,"  he  says,  "to  note  the  purely  me- 
chanical stroke  of  the  crowbar  and  shovel ;  the  work- 
men simply  went  faithfully  through  the  motions  that 
they  were  hired  to  make,  not  one  of  them  worked  as  if 
he  had  an  interest  in  the  job  yet  not  one  was  lazy  or 
shirking.  The  engineers,  however,  showed  the  intensest 


THE    CRITICS    OF    WEALTH  81 

interest,  a  nervous,  high-strung  devotion,  as  if  brain 
and  heart  were  all  in  the  enterprise.  On  them  was  the 
responsibility  of  the  shovels,  the  blasts,  the  results, 
but  the  living  machines,  the  workmen,  just  put  forth 
the  muscular  movements  that  the  engineers  had  calcu- 
lated to  be  necessary. 

"The  exposure  and  danger  were  alike  to  both  the 
engineers  and  the  laborers,  but  the  laborers  could  give 
their  undivided  mental  energy  to  keep  up  their  pluck, 
to  safeguard  themselves  from  nervous  depression,  to 
keep  muscles  mechanically  moving,  not  an  ounce  of 
energy  did  they  need  to  expend  in  thinking!  The 
workingman  swung  the  tools,  swung  and  swung,  until 
his  shift  was  relieved  and  he  was  done,  but  the  eager 
and  expensive  thinking  was  burning  up  the  vital  forces 
of  the  engineers.  The  push,  the  relentless  will,  that 
attacks  each  fresh  menace  of  defeat ;  the  hours  by 
night  and  day  when  dauntless  faith  in  his  figures  alone 
sustains  the  engineer  as  he  defies  nature,  these  things 
earn  large  compensation.  Nothing  of  this  was  sug- 
gested by  any  remark  of  the  engineers  themselves,  who 
seemed  happy  as  conquerors,  but  I  should  want  others 
to  see  it  in  this  light." 

Only  accumulated  wealth  to  an  enormous  amount 
has  made  possible  this  extraordinary  undertaking  that 
is  to  furnish  pure  mountain  water  to  the  millions  who 
live  in  New  York  City. 

Only  accumulated  wealth  has  made  possible  the  net- 
work of  railroads  in  our  country  that  has  made  it  so 
easy  and  so  cheap  to  transport  food  and  other  sup- 
plies from  any  part  of  the  country  to  another,  and  so 


82 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

has  made  impossible  in  this  country  the  famines  that 
have  swept  off  the  populations  in  others. 

Only  accumulated  wealth  has  made  possible  in  this 
country  the  scientific  light  which  has  made  possible 
home  reading  and  study  of  evenings  and  so  made  our 
people  the  best  educated  and  best  informed  people  in 
the  world. 

It  is  useless  to  rail  against  the  idle  rich  for  unless 
they  are  educated  and  thinkers  they  soon  exterminate 
themselves.  I  once  knew  intimately  an  Irish  rail- 
road contractor,  so  ignorant  and  uneducated  that  it 
was  impossible  for  him  to  write  a  longhand  letter.  He 
could  barely  sign  his  own  name,  yet  he  had  made  him- 
self more  than  a  millionaire  by  railroad  construction  in 
judiciously  selected  locations.  Ignorant,  uneducated 
and  uncultured,  he  had  no  interest  in  the  world  except 
money  and  complained  bitterly  that  his  money  was  of 
no  use  to  him  because  he  could  not  eat  it  up  or  drink 
it  up  without  killing  himself.  In  an  effort  to  keep 
him  from  doing  that  I  undertook  to  get  him  interested 
in  art,  and  finally  induced  him  to  spend  several  hun- 
dred thousand  dollars  in  buying  a  collection  of  the 
best  modern  painters. 

One  of  the  great  Socialist  papers  complaining  of  the 
financial  methods  of  the  late  J.  P.  Morgan,  wrote  an 
editorial,  asking:  "Why  don't  the  people  hire  J.  P. 
Morgan  and  be  done  with  it?"  The  strange  thing 
about  the  Socialist  writers  and  thinkers  is  that  they  fail 
to  realize  that  that  was  exactly  what  the  people  had 
been  doing  from  the  time  Mr.  Morgan  entered  business. 
He  had  been  in  the  employ  of  the  people,  gathering  to- 


THE    CRITICS    OF    WEALTH  83 

gather  the  little  surpluses  from  here  and  there  until  in 
his  hands  it  became  a  surplus  of  a  size  sufficiently  large 
to  construct  great  service  institutions  for  the  benefit  of 
the  people.  The  so-called  fortune  that  Mr.  Morgan 
left  at  his  death  was  really  only  a  small  commission 
paid  by  the  people  to  Mr.  Morgan  for  his  lifelong 
services  in  their  behalf. 

One  of  its  readers  protested  to  the  New  York 
Journal  against  the  purchase  by  J.  P.  Morgan  of  a  rare 
book  at  the  Hoe  sale  for  $42,800  and  asked  the  Journal 
to  write  an  editorial  denouncing  such  waste,  but  the 
Journal  replied  that,  "They  were  unable  to  criticize 
Mr.  Morgan's  action  in  paying  $42,800  for  a  book," 
saying,  "first,  we  must  point  out  to  our  reader  that 
the  world  is  no  worse  off  or  poorer  now  than  it  was 
before  Mr.  Morgan  bought  the  book.  Nothing  was 
actually  spent  when  the  book  was  bought.  The  only 
difference  is  that  $42,800  that  once  belonged  to  Mr. 
Morgan  now  belongs  to  the  heirs  of  Mr.  Hoe.  Does 
that  make  any  difference  to  anybody  or  do  any  harm? 
Not  a  bit  of  it !  If,  however,  Mr.  Morgan  had  taken 
$42,800  and  squandered  it  by  employing  men  in  use- 
less labor  and  taking  them  away  from  useful  labor 
that  would  be  a  loss. 

"The  big  prices  that  Mr.  Morgan  pays  stimulates 
research  and  sets  many  men  to  hunting  in  ruins  or  in 
old  book  stores  and  picture  galleries  and  collections 
for  valuable  works  of  art.  A  man  renders  great 
service  to  the  public  and  to  the  future,  who  collects 
these  priceless  treasures,  puts  them  in  fireproof  build- 
ings, as  Mr.  Morgan  does,  where  they  will  be  safe 


84 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

permanently,  and  makes  it  possible  for  all  the  people 
to  see  them  and  study  them  and  get  from  them  educa- 
tion. Mr.  Morgan  at  least  has  made  the  future  se- 
cure by  gathering  them  together  and  protecting  them 
instead  of  leaving  them  scattered  in  the  hands  of  many, 
and  probably,  forever  lost.  But  there  is  another  par- 
ticular thing  that  Mr.  Morgan  has  done,  finer  than 
collecting  pictures,  and  more  magnificent  than  building 
up  a  $1,500,000,000  Steel  Corporation.  Mr.  Morgan 
has  spent  in  the  construction  and  maintenance  of  a 
Lying-in  Hospital,  devoted  to  the  care  of  poor  women 
and  babies  in  New  York  City,  more  than  he  ever 
spent  on  any  book  or  picture  or  collection  at  any 
time.  In  the  Morgan  Hospital,  mothers  in  childbirth 
receive  the  best  care  that  science  can  provide.  They 
are  looked  after  by  the  best  nurses,  highly-paid,  thor- 
oughly trained.  They  are  asked  no  questions  about 
their  religion  or  nationality.  The  fact  that  a  woman 
is  poor  and  soon  to  be  a  mother  is  sufficient  to  obtain 
for  her  entrance  to  Mr.  Morgan's  Maternity  Hospital. 
Mr.  Morgan  does  in  his  hospital  with  the  money  that 
his  financial  genius  has  given  to  him,  the  work  that 
the  public  ought  to  do  but  which  the  public  does  not 
know  enough  to  do.  Personally,  we  are  extremely 
glad  that  Mr.  Morgan  has  been  able  to  pile  up  millions, 
since  with  the  millions  he  does  for  the  people  most  of 
the  things  that  they  have  not  brains  enough  to  do  for 
themselves." 

COULD  WEALTH  HAVE  ANY  GREATER 
DEFENSE  than  that  coming  from  this  paper,  notor- 
ious for  its  attacks  upon  wealth?  And  take  notice 


THE    CRITICS    OF    WEALTH  85 

that  the  hospital  referred  to  was  constructed  with  part 
of  the  profits  of  the  organization  of  the  Fifteen-Hun- 
dred-Million-Dollar  Corporation,  which  the  Journal 
has  so  frequently  condemned. 

Why  could  it  not  be  equally  just  to  Mr.  Rockefeller, 
who  through  his  wonderful  Foundation  has  for  years 
conducted  a  Bureau  of  Medical  Research  that  has 
brought  untold  benefit  to  the  whole  population  of  the 
earth  ?  He  has  done  more  to  spread  the  cause  of  edu- 
cation than  any  man  who  ever  lived,  and  is  using 
his  genius  for  organization  to  insure  the  continuance  of 
the  benefits  that  he  has  conferred  on  mankind,  after 
he  has  departed  this  life. 

Several  years  ago,  in  describing  himself  and  others 
who  have  accumulated  vast  fortunes,  Mr.  Rockefeller 
said:  "I  am  harnessed  to  a  cart  in  which  the  people 
ride ;  whether  I  like  it  or  not,  I  must  work  for  the  race. 
The  first  step  I  took  in  business  obligated  me  to 
the  men  who  worked  for  me  and  who  thenceforward 
looked  to  me  for  employment,  and  investors  who  put 
in  their  money  and  looked  to  me  for  results.  The 
workingmen,  numbering  but  a  few  score  at  first,  then 
hundreds,  then  thousands,  and  now,  approximately,  a 
million  and  a  half.  There  was  a  similar  increase  in 
the  number  of  investors,  who  were  holding  me  to 
account,  while  I  worked  for  myself,  I  had  to  work  for 
them.  We  are  servants — not  masters,  we,  who  are 
or  have  been  engaged  in  large  business  affairs.  It  is 
our  most  vital  interest  that  the  country  shall  prosper, 
and  that  all  the  people  shall  prosper,  for  only  then  can 
we  find  among  them  a  market  for  what  we  produce. 


86 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

The  people  can  destroy  us,  or  our  business,  but  in  so 
doing  they  destroy  our  power  of  serving  them.  In 
fact,  we  would  probably  suffer  the  least.  The  richest 
man  in  the  world  can  only  eat  three  meals  a  day,  and 
it  does  not  take  much  to  dress  as  well  as  is  possible 
or  to  provide  real  luxury  in  living.  The  men  who  have 
acquired  the  largest  fortunes  have  not  pursued  wealth. 
Had  they  desired  money  for  the  enjoyment  of  money, 
they  would  have  stopped  far  short  of  spending  their 
whole  lives  as  they  have  in  the  struggle,  that  is  busi- 
ness, but  these  men  continue  to  toil  at  their  desks,  be- 
cause they  love  achievement.  They  work  for  the  keen 
delight  of  creating  something  where  nothing  was,  and 
some  time  the  people  will  be  convinced  that  these  men 
were  toiling  for  love  of  their  country  as  well."  While 
ignorance  strives  to  destroy  what  it  does  not  under- 
stand intelligence  labors  to  reproduce  in  physical  aspect 
that  which  it  has  seen  in  the  mind's  eye  long  before. 
The  investment  of  wealth  in  the  construction  of 
large  plants  that  have  superseded  small  ones  has  re- 
sulted in  the  decrease  in  the  price  of  kerosene  from  30 
cents  a  gallon  to  10  cents  a  gallon ;  of  sugar  from  20 
cents  a  pound  to  4  or  5  cents  per  pound;  of  gas  from 
$2.50  per  1000  feet  to  $1.00  per  thousand,  and  elec- 
tricity from  25  cents  a  Kilowatt  to  2  cents  a  Kilowatt, 
if  used  in  large  quantities.  The  charges  of  8  and  10 
cents  a  Kilowatt  now  made  for  ordinary  lighting  serv- 
ice are  due  entirely  to  the  cost  of  installation  and  the 
delivery  of  current  in  such  small  quantities  as  are  used 
by  the  ordinary  users  of  electric  light.  It  is  like  ask- 
ing your  milkman  to  deliver  cream  by  the  thimbleful. 


THE    CRITICS    OF    WEALTH  87 

Careful  investigation  has  discovered  the  fact  that 
the  prices  of  non-trust  articles  have  advanced  much 
more  than  the  prices  of  the  articles  manufactured  by 
trusts,  and  this  is  as  we  would  have  a  right  to  expect, 
for  articles  manufactured  by  the  largest  corporations, 
or  trusts,  have  every  facility  that  great  capital  can  sup- 
ply and  command  a  higher  efficiency  and  better  skill 
than  articles  manufactured  by  smaller  or  non-trust 
producers. 

Two  different  investigations  conducted  by  the  Gov- 
ernment have  disclosed  the  fact  that  the  meat  packers 
do  their  business  on  less  than  a  two-per-cent  margin, 
while  the  small  dealer  of  meats,  of  poultry,  or  of  green 
vegetables,  makes  from  100  to  300  per  cent  on  every 
sale.  I  know  one  keeper  of  a  stand  in  front  of  a  meat 
shop  whose  capital  is  only  $100  but  his  turnover  is 
$15,000  every  year  and  out  of  it  he  makes  $5,000  net 
profit.  The  retail  prices  of  everything  are  abnormally 
high  because  there  are  too  many  retailers  in  the  first 
place  with  too  great  an  expense  for  rents  and  dupli- 
cated delivery  service.  Instead  of  attacking  the  Pack- 
ing Houses  for  converting  cattle  and  hogs  on  the  hoof 
into  meat  on  a  two-per-cent  margin  of  profit,  the 
whole  meat-consuming  public  should  ask  the  great 
Packing  Companies  to  extend  their  efficiency  into  the 
retailing  of  meat  and  put  out  of  business  the  hundreds 
of  thousands  of  small  meat  shops  that  are  compelled  to 
charge  the  people  abnormal  prices  for  meat  in  order  to 
run  their  small,  uneconomically  conducted  businesses. 
It  is  possible  that  the  Packing  Companies  would  make 
additional  large  profits  by  doing  so,  but  they  would 


A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 


save  the  masses  of  the  people  who  buy  meats,  hundreds 
of  millions  of  dollars  by  so  doing.  Think  what  it  would 
mean  to  every  meat  eater  if  meat  was  distributed  as 
economically  as  the  Standard  Oil  Company  distributes 
oil. 

The  experience  of  every  attack  on  a  so-called  "trust- 
produced  article"  has  been,  that  the  break-up  of  trust 
methods  and  trust  distribution  has  destroyed  the  effi- 
ciency in  that  line  of  business  and  made  prices  of  such 
commodities  higher  to  the  consumers  throughout  the 
world.  What  is  the  use  of  declaiming  against  profi- 
teering while  you  keep  on  clamoring  for  laws  that 
protect  the  profiteers  and  legalize  their  methods  and 
impositions  ? 

The  middlemen,  who  have  made  their  livings  hereto- 
fore, by  standing  between  the  producer  and  consumer, 
very  naturally  object  to  being  eliminated  and  driven 
out  of  their  easy  livings.  It  is  to  their  clamor  that  most 
of  the  economic  legislation  that  harasses  business 
should  be  attributed,  but  as  certainly  as  the  law  of 
gravitation  forces  water  to  run  down  hill,  so  those 
methods  that  mean  cheaper  production  and  more  effi- 
cient and  economical  distribution  will  tend  to  establish 
themselves  in  spite  of  legislative  prohibitions. 

People  must  be  brought  to  realize  that  the  great  or- 
ganizations that  serve  them  so  well  are  only  possible 
through  the  existence  of  great  wealth  in  the  first  place, 
and  through  the  investment  of  that  wealth  in  the  pro- 
duction of  articles  for  public  use  and  construction  for 
public  benefit  and  service.  The  impossibility  of  the 
thriftless  providing  for  themselves  is  nowhere  better 


THE    CRITICS    OF    WEALTH 


illustrated  than  in  this  matter  of  service.  The  rail- 
roads of  this  country  were  only  possible  through  the 
use  of  the  wealth  of  this  country  in  their  construction, 
and  as  long  as  wealth  was  protected  in  this  form,  the 
construction  of  additional  railroads  for  the  service  of 
the  country  and  the  people  in  it  continued.  But  when 
attacks  began  to  be  made  upon  wealth  in  the  form  of 
railroads,  it  became  impossible  to  get  new  wealth  to 
invest  in  this  way.  As  the  people  have  been  getting 
no  additional  railway  service  on  this  account,  either  in 
new  mileage  or  in  additional  trains  and  car  service, 
traffic  became  congested,  rolling  stock  deteriorated,  and 
as  a  result,  the  labor  of  the  country  is  suffering  today 
from  poorer  train  service,  greatly  increased  costs,  stag- 
nation, and  destruction  of  its  own  prosperity,  because 
of  its  own  foolish  attack  on  the  surplus  savings,  or 
wealth,  of  those  who  formerly  furnished  them  with 
abundant  train  service  at  a  cost  more  than  50  per  cent 
less  than  they  are  paying  now. 

People  in  attacking  the  corporations  seem  to  imagine 
that  a  corporation  is  some  great  monster  that  is  self- 
creating  and  that  devours  them.  The  truth  is  that  a 
corporation  is  one  of  the  most  beneficent  devices  of 
thinking  men  to  enable  people  to  contribute  as  much, 
or  as  little,  as  they  please  toward  a  fund  to  be  used 
in  some  business  or  in  some  project  without  hazarding 
the  rest  of  their  savings  or  property.  A  corporation 
is  nothing  but  a  limited  partnership,  toward  whose 
common  fund  the  separate  partners  have  contributed 
in  proportion  to  their  holdings  of  shares.  Any 


90 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

given  corporation  is  therefore  simply  a  partnership 
made  up  of  the  farmer,  the  machinist,  the  merchant, 
the  clergyman,  the  school-teacher,  the  doctor,  the 
lawyer,  and  rarely  the  banker,  who  have  contributed 
their  shares  to  the  common  fund.  I  say,  rarely  the 
banker,  because  usually  the  banker  instead  of  con- 
tributing to  the  original  fund  loans  money  to  the 
partnership,  so  that  the  fund  contributed  by  the  others 
is  security  for  his  loan. 

Mr.  Darwin  P.  Kingsley,  in  an  address  made  some 
time  ago  on  the  subject  of  recent  legislative  tenden- 
cies, declared  that:  "It  was  no  remedy  to  make  suc- 
cess a  crime,  since  life  and  liberty  cannot  be  protected 
by  failure."  Someone  attempted  to  answer  him,  de- 
claring that  the  "Sherman  law  denounces  as  criminal 
not  success  but  the  wicked  methods  that  certain  men 
have  adopted  to  attain  success."  Now  the  Sherman 
law  in  its  terms  prohibits  and  denounces  as  criminal, 
combinations  or  consolidations  by  or  between  any  per- 
sons, businesses  or  corporations  that  formerly  were 
competing  with  each  other.  It  ignores  the  fact  that  the 
competition  that  it  sought  to  perpetuate  nearly  always 
resulted  in  the  failure  and  elimination  of  one  or  the 
other  of  the  competitors.  Will  anyone  attempt  to 
prove  that  it  is  wicked  to  save  something  out  of  the 
small  businesses  that  are  unable  to  operate  economi- 
cally or  efficiently  and  to  give  the  public  the  benefit  of 
the  increased  economy  and  efficiency  that  result  from 
consolidation  and  the  cutting  out  of  the  cost  of  dupli- 
cated service? 


THE    CRITICS    OF    WEALTH  _91 

I  have  in  mind,  two  municipally-owned  lighting 
companies,  where  the  municipalities  found  it  impossible 
to  get  enough  business  to  pay  the  expenses  of  operat- 
ing their  separate  power  houses  much  less  to  pay  the 
interest  on  the  city  investment  in  the  plant.  They  sold 
out  to  the  privately-owned  company  and  saved  the  city 
the  deficit  from  operation,  paid  off  the  bonded  debt 
created  for  the  construction  of  the  plant,  relieved 
the  taxpayers  from  the  interest  on  this  debt,  and  by 
giving  the  privately-owned  company  a  much  increased 
volume  of  business  without  increasing  its  plant  or 
cost  of  operation,  enabled  it  to  furnish  service  at  a 
lower  rate  and  still  make  a  good  profit  on  its  capital, 
which  it  had  not  been  able  to  do  before. 

Socialistic  legislation  has  attempted  to  dictate  the 
terms  on  which  private  capital  might  engage  in  public 
service,  but  the  experience  of  the  people  with  this 
sort  of  legislation  has  shown  conclusively  that  private 
capital  cannot  be  compelled  to  furnish  public  service  on 
terms  that  are  not  satisfactory  to  it.  While  the  attempt 
of  a  community  to  make  compulsory  levies  upon  cap- 
ital in  the  nature  of  taxation  in  order  to  furnish  this 
public  service  through  municipal  plants  has  resulted 
in  capital  fleeing  from  the  community  and  so  leaving 
the  community  poorer  than  it  was  before. 

If  I  and  my  friends  together,  raise  a  million  dollars, 
and  we  have  the  choice  between  putting  that  money 
into  a  manufacturing  plant,  or  in  the  building  of  a 
light  and  power  plant  from  which  to  serve  the  public, 
why  should  we  be  limited  in  our  profits  in  the  public 


92 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

service  investment,  while  our  profits  in  the  manufac- 
turing business  would  be  limited  only  by  our  ability 
to  turn  out  goods  and  sell  them  at  a  profit  ?  How  much 
public  service  do  you  believe  the  people  would  get  if 
we  were  limited  to  six  per  cent  on  our  investment,  if 
it  were  spent  in  public  service,  while  we  might  easily 
make  one  hundred  per  cent  if  we  spent  it  in  manufac- 
turing goods  to  be  sold  to  the  very  same  people,  who 
would  use  the  service  of  our  light  and  power  plant  if 
we  invested  the  money  in  that  line  instead  ? 

M.  Georges  Aubert,  a  prominent  French  banker,  in 
some  economic  studies,  published  some  years  ago,  after 
an  exhaustive  investigation  of  the  business  of  America 
compared  to  the  business  of  Europe,  said :  "The  great 
business  corporations  of  America  do  the  maximum  of 
business  because  they  have  the  maximum  of  quality 
and  the  maximum  of  power  to  produce.  It  is  impos- 
sible to  dream  of  their  eventual  disappearance,  on  the 
contrary,  they  must  grow  more  and  more." 

Discussing  the  growth  of  wealth  in  America,  and 
its  causes,  M.  Aubert  said:  "The  American  has  one 
enormous  advantage  over  the  French  and  English,  and 
over  Continentals,  he  works  in  a  land  where  everybody 
succeeds;  where  prosperity  is  unceasing;  where  the 
unfortunate,  as  we  know  them  in  Europe,  do  not  ex- 
ist ;  where  people  unlucky  in  business,  even  those  who 
have  failed  in  business,  get  back  on  their  feet  again 
without  loss  of  time,  a  thing  utterly  impossible  in 
Europe.  In  this,  the  American  is  aided  by  the  very 
great  freedom  given  under  the  American  laws  to  all 


THE    CRITICS    OF    WEALTH 93 

American  citizens,  in  civics  as  well  as  in  commerce 
and  finance,  while  our  French  laws  are  based  upon  the 
permanent  control  of  the  individual  in  all  of  his  mani- 
festations." 

Wherever  government  interferes  to  control  or  to 
regulate,  it  hinders  production,  hoards  product,  im- 
pedes distribution  and  prevents  consumption  while 
the  hoarded  products  spoil  and  waste. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  AMERICAN  ATTITUDE  TOWARD 
WEALTH 

Can  We  Buy  Peace  by  Paying  Blackmail? 

HE  reason  for  the  great  prosperity  and  de- 
velopment of  the  United  States  has  been 
that  in  spite  of  all  uneconomic  legislation, 
no  nation  has  been  so  protected  from  So- 


cialism by  its  fundamental  law  or  has  given  such  pro- 
tection to  private  property  as  we  have  here  in  the 
United  States.  The  provisions  of  the  Constitution 
operated  to  protect  the  thrifty  and  the  industrious  until 
the  recent  Amendment  providing  for  the  Income  Tax, 
which  was  so  loosely  drawn  as  to  open  the  door  not 
only  to  the  confiscation  of  income  but  to  the  plunder 
of  the  property  itself  from  which  the  income  is  de- 
rived. 

In  Europe  the  system  of  property  ownership  was 
based  on  the  protection  of  the  occupant  of  the  land 
from  raids  and  wars,  and  so  the  occupier  of  land  paid 
to  a  military  overlord  a  share  of  the  product  in  return 
for  this  protection.  This  is  what  we  call  the  Feudal 
System,  but  in  our  Colonial  days  the  settlers  had  no 
military  overlord.  They  did  their  clearing  and  farm- 
ing with  their  rifles  at  hand,  and  when  necessarv  volun- 
tarily organized  themselves  into  bands  either  to  drive 

94 


AMERICAN    ATTITUDE    TOWARD    WEALTH        95 

the  Indians  farther  away  or  to  punish  them  for  their 
attacks,  and  gradually  as  population  became  thicker 
and  it  was  not  necessary  for  all  able-bodied  men  to 
engage  in  this  work  of  protection,  they  taxed  them- 
selves voluntarily  and  used  the  proceeds  to  pay  pro- 
fessional soldiers  to  protect  them. 

When  our  Government  first  established  itself,  practi- 
cally every  adult  male  in  the  Colonies  was  either  an 
owner  of  land  or  expected  soon  to  be,  consequently  in 
the  formation  of  the  Federal  Constitution  the  rights 
of  the  owners  of  land  were  carefully  protected,  and 
nothing  was  incorporated  in  it  that  would  operate  to 
discourage  the  individual  initiative  necessary  to  in- 
duce young  or  courageous  men  to  go  Westward  into 
the  wilderness  and  by  their  individual  industry  create 
values  out  of  lands  that  were  unoccupied  and  valueless. 

Most  of  the  older  men,  who  were  members  of  the 
Constitutional  Convention,  had  done  the  same  thing 
with  the  land  they  then  held,  and  with  a  knowledge 
of  how  the  overlords  of  Europe  not  only  claimed  title 
to  the  land  but  freely  dispossessed  therefrom  tenants, 
who  had  so  long  occupied  it  and  cultivated  it  as  to 
become  to  all  intents  and  purposes  the  owners  thereof, 
they  carefully  protected  themselves  from  any  such 
system  ever  becoming  prevalent  in  this  country  by  pro- 
viding that  none  of  the  private  property  which  they 
had  created  out  of  a  wilderness  should  be  taken  with- 
out due  process  of  law  and  compensation.  The  ex- 
perience of  the  Race  with  all  governments  recorded  in 
history  had  proven  the  wisdom  of  such  a  provision, 
and  they  did  not  intend  that  the  government  which 


96 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

they  were  setting  up  should  ever  have  the  right  under 
any  pretext  of  necessity  to  adopt  or  pursue  a  policy 
••of  confiscation. 

The  experience  of  this  country  of  ours  in  the  past 
four  years  has  shown  how  quickly  the  Government 
has  done  exactly  this  thing  as  soon  as  the  protection 
provided  in  the  original  Constitution  had  been  waived. 

Another  thing  which  our  forefathers  provided 
against  was  the  prevention  of  that  system,  so  preva- 
lent in  Europe,  of  declaring  political  revolutionists 
outlaws  and  confiscating  their  property  to  the  exclu- 
sion of  their  heirs.  So  the  founders  of  this  country 
provided  that  there  should  be  no  attainder  of  blood 
that  would  prevent  the  inheritance  of  property  by  the 
heirs  of  any  man. 

It  was  with  an  eye  to  the  experience  of  private  in- 
dividuals under  monarchial  governments  that  made 
the  drafters  of  the  Constitution  provide  that  no  law 
should  be  passed  impairing  the  obligations  of  contracts, 
so  when  a  contract  was  made  and  the  consideration 
paid,  an  individual  had  a  right  to  depend  upon  its 
terms  being  carried  out.  It  is  foolish  indeed  for  politi- 
cal philosophers  to  pretend  that  this  provision  was 
never  intended  to  apply  to  contracts  between  the 
people  on  one  hand  and  individuals  who  contract  to 
supply  them  with  service  on  the  other. 

People  who  rail  at  corporations  fail  to  realize  that 
the  first  corporations  here,  as  well  as  in  Europe,  were 
Church  Organizations,  and  then  Monastic  Orders  and 
Educational  Institutions.  The  Dartmouth  College  Case, 
which  laid  the  foundations  of  corporation  law  in  this 


AMERICAN    ATTITUDE    TOWARD    WEALTH        97 

country,  involved  the  rights  of  men  associated  for  the 
purpose  of  conducting  an  educational  institution  and 
not  a  business  enterprise  for  profit.  It  has  been 
argued  that  had  the  case  been  otherwise  the  decision 
would  have  been  the  reverse,  but  what  else  could 
Judges  with  consciences  do  but  decide  as  they  did,  and 
hold  that  when  a  group  of  individuals  applied  for  a 
charter  to  conduct  a  corporation  for  a  certain  purpose 
and  the  State  then  granted  that  charter,  that  the 
charter  when  so  granted  constituted  a  contract  between 
the  State  and  the  men  composing  the  corporation,  that 
they  should  and  could  conduct  the  enterprise  or  busi- 
ness as  provided  in  the  charter. 

The  provision  of  the  Fourteenth  Amendment,  assur- 
ing civil  rights  to  all  persons  and  denying  to  the  State 
the  right  to  treat  individuals  in  unequal  ways,  was 
right  then  and  right  now,  and  it  really  should  be  in- 
voked at  the  present  time  to  protect  the  unequal  taxa- 
tion of  property  when  held  by  individuals  in  their  own 
names  and  when  held  by  the  same  individuals  through 
the  medium  of  a  corporation.  Nobody  would  have 
dreamed  a  few  years  ago  that  anyone  would  seriously 
propose  a  few  years  later  to  plunder  and  deprive  part 
of  our  citizens  of  their  civil  rights  or  that  property  held 
by  a  group  of  individuals  unpartitioned  would  be  taxed 
differently  than  the  same  property  if  divided  up  among 
persons  interested  in  it  in  proportion  to  their  interest 
therein.  These  provisions  and  amendments  were  for 
the  purpose  of  insuring  a  fair  deal  and  equal  treat- 
ment to  all  property,  and  under  such  laws  it  was  im- 
possible for  grafters  and  socialists  to  oppress  it.  The 


98 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

modifications  have  been  secured  by  demagogues  to  en- 
able the  political  grafters  to  get  at  it. 

When  our  Constitution  was  adopted  this  country  was 
poor  and  every  one  knew  and  appreciated  the  need 
for  increased  production  and  of  thrift  and  saving  in 
order  to  create  the  capital  for  further  development. 
This  was  the  reason  why  such  protection  was  insured 
toward  accumulated  surplus  and  the  evidences  of  in- 
dustry shown  in  the  improvement  of  unimproved  land, 
but  it  is  not  true  that  the  Constitution  gave  any  special 
privileges  or  powers  to  property.  It  only  insured 
equal  treatment  to  property  and  ignored  entirely  the 
fact  that  it  might  be  owned  by  an  individual  or  by  sev- 
eral individuals  associated  in  a  corporation.  If  ever  a 
Constitution  justified  itself,  it  is  ours  by  our  growth 
of  prosperity  under  it. 

It  has  been  claimed  that  the  Government  in  our 
Constitution,  attempted  to  divide  the  powers  between 
property  owners  on  one  hand  and  the  non-property 
owning  voters  on  the  other  hand,  but  this  is  not  so; 
the  drafters  of  the  Constitution  did  not  recognize  the 
fact  that  there  could  be  non-property  voters,  but  only 
that  there  might  be  the  ignorant  and  unthinking  on  one 
hand  and  educated,  responsible  people  on  the  other.  It 
recognized  the  necessity  of  conserving  property  and 
making  it  worth  the  individual's  while  to  create 
property,  so  the  Constitution  carefully  forebade  either 
the  legislative  authorities  or  the  executives  from  inter- 
fering with  the  rights  of  property,  however  held.  This 
protection  assured  to  property  by  our  fundamental  law 
made  it  safe  for  every  individual  in  our  country  to 


AMERICAN    ATTITUDE    TOWARD    WEALTH        99 

engage  in  creating  property  and  it  has  been  due  to  this 
policy  that  we  have  grown  in  a  hundred  and  thirty 
years  to  become  richer  than  all  the  countries  of 
Europe  combined  with  their  population  four  times 
greater  than  ours,  and  their  thousand  years  of  produc- 
tion and  accumulation  behind  them.  What  Americans 
should  realize  is  that  Europe  has  become  intensely 
jealous  of  our  prosperity  and  that  the  recent  propa- 
ganda attacking  wealth  has  originated  in  Europe,  and  is 
being  urged  here  in  an  effort  to  destroy  our  prosperity, 
eliminate  the  theory  of  government  on  which  our 
practice  is  founded,  and  drag  us  back  to  a  par  with 
Europe. 

Ferrero,  the  Italian  Historian,  after  an  exhaustive 
investigation  and  study  of  conditions  in  America,  de- 
clared that :  "The  great  growth  of  wealth  in  America 
has  been  due  to  the  freedom  and  private  initiative 
granted  to  individuals  which  was  the  underlying  prin- 
ciple of  the  American  constitution,  while  in  Europe 
personal  freedom  and  private  initiative  is  limited  on 
every  hand  by  the  control  which  the  State  retains  over 
all  enterprise."  He  was  particularly  impressed  by  the 
fact  that  the  richest  man  in  America,  Rockefeller, 
lived  in  a  perfectly  plain  five-story  brick  house  in  a 
side  street  in  New  York,  which  an  ordinary  merchant 
of  Europe  would  scorn  to  live  in;  that  the  residence 
of  Mr.  Morgan  was  small  and  unpretentious  and 
could  not  have  cost  a  fraction  of  what  he  had  spent  on 
his  library;  that  although  Carnegie  had  built  libraries 
like  palaces  all  over  America  he  lived  in  a  house 
which  an  ordinary  European  nobleman  would  scorn, 


100 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

and  that  nowhere  in  America  did  he  find  anything  to 
compare  with  the  hundreds  and  hundreds  of  palaces 
built  by  royalty  and  nobility  in  Great  Britain  and  the 
countries  of  Europe.  He  noticed  another  thing: 
wherever  he  went  in  America  among  the  homes  of  the 
rich,  he  saw  many  books  and  great  libraries,  and  much 
of  the  world's  finest  art,  but  few  jewels." 

There  has  been  much  talk  of  privileged  classes  and 
piling  up  of  wealth  through  privileges,  but  I  have 
never  yet  seen  a  single  one  of  these  protestants,  who 
was  able  to  mention  a  single  privilege  that  any  man 
held.  The  truth  is  that  there  is  no  such-  thing  as 
privilege,  except  a  privilege  to  work  and  a  privilege 
to  serve  others  by  doing  for  them  what  they  are  un- 
able or  unwilling  to  do  for  themselves.  It  is  common 
to  refer  to  the  laws  as  having  granted  privileges  to 
someone,  but  the  truth  is  that  the  laws  have  never 
granted  privileges,  but  have  always  been  attempting 
to  interfere  with  natural  equality,  or  economic  laws, 
by  attempting  to  take  away  from  successful  individuals 
the  right  to  do  the  things  which  they  have  learned  to 
do  better  than  anyone  else.  It  has  been  pretended  by 
a  school  of  political  philosophers  that  the  protective 
laws  in  this  country  were  for  the  benefit  of  the  wealthy, 
but  it  is  not  true.  Protective  laws  operate  not  for  the 
benefit  of  wealth  or  of  capital  but  for  the  benefit  of 
labor,  and  there  is  not  a  possessor  of  wealth  or  capital 
who  does  not  know  that  he  would  be  richer  and 
better  off  if  all  protective  laws  were  repealed  and 
there  was  free  competition  of  labor  throughout  the 
world. 


AMERICAN    ATTITUDE    TOWARD    WEALTH      101 

The  folly  of  those  who  pretend  that  the  fortunes  of 
American  manufacturers  are  due  to  privilege  is  shown 
in  the  fact  that  in  this  country,  Socialists  claim  that 
the  high  tariff  that  has  built  up  industry  has  been  re- 
sponsible for  the  grinding  down  of  labor  and  the 
creation  of  unearned  fortunes  for  the  manufacturers 
in  protected  industries.  But  the  disproof  of  the  pro- 
tective tariff  as  a  reason  for  creating  the  fortunes 
made  by  those  engaged  in  these  industries  is  shown 
by  the  fact  that  fortunes  just  as  large  have  been 
and  are  being  made  in  Great  Britain  by  the  manu- 
facturers in  the  same  line  under  the  conditions  of 
free  trade,  and  that  the  same  conditions  which  laborers 
here  complain  of  as  being  due  to  a  protective  tariff  are 
complained  against  by  the  laborers  of  Great  Britain, 
who  lay  their  conditions  to  the  evils  of  free  trade.  The 
truth  is  that  privilege  has  nothing  to  do  with  the 
condition  of  labor  in  either  place  but  is  due  to  the 
ignorance  and  thriftlessness  of  labor  itself,  while 
neither  protection  in  America  nor  free  trade  in  Eng- 
land, prevents  men  of  managerial  ability  from  manu- 
facturing their  goods  and  selling  them  at  a  profit. 

The  attacks  of  demagogues  and  agitators  upon 
wealth  and  capital  has  always  been  professedly  based 
on  the  pretended  crimes  and  misdeeds  of  wealth  and 
capital,  but  in  truth,  they  have  never  been  anything 
else  than  blackmailing  expeditions  on  the  part  of 
legislators  and  politicians  back  of  them. 

Missouri,  bringing  its  well-known  and  widely  adver- 
tised suit  against  the  Standard  Oil  Company,  exulted 
over  the  judgment  of  ouster,  but  when  the  Standard 


102 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

Oil  Company  started  to  tear  down  reservoirs  which 
could  not  be  sold,  and  to  demolish  its  hundreds  of  sta- 
tions, and  to  discharge  its  thousands  of  employees, 
the  State  realized  that  the  injury  to  itself  was  far 
greater  than  any  possible  injury  to  the  Standard  Oil 
Company,  and  so  instead  of  enforcing  its  judgment  of 
ouster,  which  it  had  secured  on  professedly  high  moral 
grounds,  it  proceeded  to  dicker  like  the  blackmailer, 
which  it  was,  over  the  payments  and  terms  which  the 
company  should  make  for  the  privilege  of  continuing 
to  serve  and  enrich  the  inhabitants  of  the  State. 

Arkansas  brought  suits  for  penalties  aggregating 
sixty-five  million  dollars  against  sixty-five  insurance 
companies  doing  business  in  that  State,  but  when  the 
companies  instead  of  offering  to  pay,  withdrew  from 
business  in  the  State,  and  the  citizens  found  it  impos- 
sible to  secure  insurance,  the  blackmailing  suits  were 
abandoned. 

Kentucky  sued  the  Southern  Pacific  for  four  mil- 
lion dollars.  Texas  collected  a  fine  of  two  million  dol- 
lars from  the  Waters-Pierce  Oil  Company,  and  the 
United  States  Government,  advertising  widely  the 
alleged  frauds  of  the  American  Sugar  Refining  Com- 
pany started  the  suits  that  it  brought  against  that  com- 
pany for  two  million  dollars,  but  carefully  concealed 
from  the  people  the  fact  that,  during  the  period  cov- 
ered by  the  alleged  irregularities,  the  Sugar  Com- 
pany had  paid  without  question,  three  hundred  and 
thirty-four  million  dollars  of  duty  and  that  the  amount 
involved  in  the  so-called  "irregularities"  was  less  than 
two-thirds  of  one  per  cent. 


AMERICAN    ATTITUDE    TOWARD    WEALTH       1Q3 

The  attempt  to  attack  corporate  wealth  has  led  to  the 
passing  of  some  of  the  most  extraordinary  laws  ever 
conceived  by  disordered  human  minds.  In  Kentucky, 
a  law  was  passed  prohibiting  any  railroad  from  owning 
or  operating  more  than  a  single  bridge  across  the  Ohio 
River,  and  having  passed  the  law,  the  Louisville  & 
Nashville  Railroad  was  thereupon  indicted  for  owning 
two  bridges  across  the  Ohio,  although  one  of  the 
bridges  was  at  Cincinnati  and  the  other  one  at  Hen- 
derson, Kentucky,  two  hundred  miles  farther  west. 
The  Delaware,  Lackawanna  &  Western  Railroad  was 
indicted,  convicted  and  fined  two  thousand  dollars  for 
hauling  hay  over  its  own  road  to  feed  the  mules  that 
were  working  in  its  mines,  and  the  Chicago  &  Alton 
Railroad  was  fined  thousands  of  dollars  for  hauling 
freight  at  a  rate  that  had  been  published  and  in  use  for 
fourteen  years. 

Not  content  with  passing  laws  that  make  crimes  out 
of  conducting  business  in  the  usual  way,  both  Con- 
gress and  state  legislatures  have  passed  laws  which 
business  men  simply  cannot  comply  with,  but  in  the 
enforcement  of  these  laws  it  has  been  shown  plainly 
that  they  have  been  passed  for  the  purpose  of  plunder- 
ing the  industrious  and  thrifty  and  the  skillful.  (Wit- 
ness the  penalty  imposed  on  all  educated  professions 
in  the  last  income  tax  law.)  In  principle,  these  laws 
have  been  the  same  as  if  a  group  of  pygmies  had 
passed  a  law  making  it  a  capital  crime  for  any  man  to 
grow  over  six  feet  high,  on  the  ground  that  a  giant  of 
that  size  would  be  dangerous  to  the  safety  of  the  little 
men,  or  for  a  race  of  lightweights  to  pass  a  law  mak- 


104 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

ing  it  a  crime  for  any  man  to  weigh  over  two  hundred 
pounds  on  the  theory  that  no  one  could  weigh  so  much 
without  eating  more  than  his  share  of  food  and  becom- 
ing stronger  than  it  was  safe  for  the  rest  of  the  light- 
weights to  have  around,  or  for  a  race  of  men  with 
defective  vision  and  deaf  ears  to  pass  a  law  making  it 
a  crime  for  anyone  to  see  over  a  mile,  or  to  hear  calls 
or  sounds  from  a  distance  of  over  a  thousand  yards, 
because,  anyone  with  such  excellent  vision  or  good 
hearing  was  unfairly  endowed  considering  the  handi- 
caps of  his  associates. 

It  costs  four  times  as  much  in  proportion  to  haul  a 
train  of  broken  car  lots  as  it  does  to  haul  a  solid  train 
of  wheat  or  packing  house  products,  but  the  small 
dealer,  who  for  lack  of  capital  or  business  ability  is 
compelled  to  do  his  business  on  a  half-carload  basis, 
protests  against  his  wealthy  competitor  receiving  a 
freight  rate  on  his  trainload  that  is  economically  justi- 
fied, and  the  unthinking  masses  of  the  people  listening 
to  his  clamor  believe,  or  at  least  pretend  to  believe, 
that  to  give  the  big  shipper  the  rate  which  his  business 
warrants  is  giving  wealth  an  unfair  advantage  over  the 
poor  little  shipper.  If  the  unthinking  masses  would 
only  stop  to  consider,  they  would  realize  that  they  have 
not  only  done  an  uneconomic  thing  in  prohibiting  a  low 
rate  to  the  big  shipper  but  that  they  have  done  a  foolish 
thing  in  charging  themselves  more  than  they  ought  to 
pay  for  shipping  what  they  use,  in  order  to  keep  alive 
a  little  business  man,  who  from  an  economic  standpoint 
should  be  driven  out  of  business.  In  other  words,  the 
masses  of  the  people  listening  to  the  clamor  against 


AMERICAN    ATTITUDE    TOWARD    WEALTH       105 

wealth  have  needlessly  imposed  upon  themselves  the 
burden  of  supporting  a  great  mass  of  incompetent, 
inefficient  and  uneconomic  businesses,  that  are  able  to 
live  only  by  reason  of  charging  the  people  more  than 
the  people  ought  to  pay,  and  they  have  by  their  attacks 
upon  wealth  and  their  uneconomic  legislation  directed 
against  wealth  and  capital  deprived  themselves  of  the 
economical  and  efficient  service  that  can  only  be  theirs 
through  the  instrumentality  of  large  wealth. 

The  unreasonableness  of  the  regulation  of  railroad 
rates,  or  of  the  rates  for  electric  light  and  power,  or 
gas,  is  shown  when  you  attempt  to  carry  the  principle 
into  other  fields.  Everyone  knows  that  efficiency  of 
railroad  management  had  resulted  in  great  reduction  in 
railroad  rates,  and  that  new  discoveries  and  new  ma- 
chinery, which  have  been  possible  only  by  the  use  of 
large  wealth  and  capital,  has  not  only  made  much 
better  the  lighting  facilities  but  greatly  reduced  their 
cost  to  the  masses  of  the  people,  who  are  their  users. 
But  although  farm  machinery  has  been  greatly  im- 
proved and  plows  and  tractors  have  made  culti- 
vation cheaper,  while  binding  harvesting  machines 
have  greatly  cheapened  the  cost  of  harvests,  and  thresh- 
ing machines  and  flour  mills  have  cheapened  the  cost 
of  threshing  the  wheat  and  turning  it  into  flour,  the 
price  of  bread  is  higher  than  it  has  ever  been  in  the 
history  of  our  country. 

The  farm  upon  which  the  wheat  of  this  country  is 
raised  did  not  cost  originally  to  exceed  over  one  dol- 
lar and  a  half  an  acre,  so  with  cheap  land  we  have  the 
first  factor  warranting  a  demand  for  cheap  flour,  and 


106 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

it  can  easily  be  shown  that  with  the  perfection  of  farm 
machinery  it  costs  scarcely  twenty  per  cent  as  much  to 
raise  wheat  as  it  used  to  cost.  It  would,  therefore, 
be  far  more  reasonable  to  pass  a  law  declaring  that  the 
price  of  wheat  should  not  exceed  sixty  cents  a  bushel 
and  should  be  reduced  two  cents  annually  until  the 
price  of  thirty-five  cents  a  bushel  had  been  reached, 
than  it  is  to  pass  a  law  declaring  that  the  price  of  gas 
should  be  one  dollar  per  thousand  feet  and  be  reduced 
five  cents  per  annum  for  the  next  four  years,  or  that 
the  price  of  electric  current  should  be  10  cents  a  kilo- 
watt and  should  be  reduced  one  cent  a  kilowatt  annu- 
ally for  the  next  four  or  five  years. 

The  public  has  seemed  to  think  that  having  once  in- 
duced the  investment  of  wealth  in  public  enterprises 
it  has  had  that  wealth  where  it  could  not  afterwards 
withdraw  either  from  public  service  or  from  public 
plunder.  But  in  some  communities  at  least  the  plun- 
dering public  is  learning  otherwise.  Hostile  legisla- 
tion, the  forcing  by  law  of  high  wages  on  public  utility 
corporations,  and  the  denial  of  living  service  charges, 
forced  the  closing  down  and  dismantling  of  not  less 
than  forty  public  utility  properties  in  the  United 
States  last  year,  involving  in  the  aggregate,  several 
hundred  miles  of  electric  railroad  and  considerable 
withdrawals  of  service  even  for  light  and  power.  This 
should  be  a  warning  to  the  public,  for  it  is  only  a 
question  of  time  when  the  properties  which  are  still 
able  to  exist  will,  if  further  plundered,  be  compelled 
to  follow  those  that  have  ceased  business  and  with- 
drawn their  public  services. 


AMERICAN    ATTITUDE    TOWARD    WEALTH       1Q7 

Some  of  our  managers  of  great  wealth  have  been 
weakening  under  the  pressure  and  proposing  a  com- 
promise with  banditry.  Judge  Gary  recently  said  that : 
"The  rich  must  surrender  some  of  their  property  lest 
they  invite  loot."  In  the  first  place,  this  proposition  is 
immoral,  and  in  the  second  place,  it  would  defeat  the 
very  purposes  for  which  it  was  made.  It  amounts  to 
nothing  more  nor  less  than  submitting  to  blackmail, 
or  buying  peace  with  horse  thieves.  The  first  surren- 
der would  simply  invite  additional  demands  until  they 
became  unsupportable,  and  would  end  as  it  has  in 
Russia,  in  the  looting  and  destruction  of  everything, 
which  Judge  Gary  seems  to  hope  would  be  avoided  by 
the  surrender. 

The  creators  of  wealth,  and  the  builders  of  hospitals 
and  libraries,  are  frequently  criticized  on  the  score 
that  they  are  building  monuments  to  themselves  with 
money  that  should  be  distributed  among  the  poor.  But 
the  truth  is  that  money  distributed  among  the  poor 
without  the  poor  doing  anything  in  return  for  it,  is 
money  that  might  just  as  well  be  burned  up,  for  if  it 
feeds  the  poor  in  idleness,  it  simply  adds  to  their  help- 
lessness and  their  feeling  that  they  should  be  sup- 
ported out  of  charity  and  do  nothing  to  help  them- 
selves. The  best  possible  way  of  giving  to  the  poor 
is  to  use  surplus  wealth  and  capital  in  the  construction 
of  great  public  works,  where  any  and  all  men  seeking 
work  can  come  and  find  something  to  do,  and  taking 
home  his  wage  at  night,  he  can  feel  that  he  at  least  has 
done  something  to  earn  what  has  been  given  to  him, 
while  had  it  been  distributed  among  the  "poor,"  every 


108 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

recipient  of  the  gift  would  have  known  that  he  had 
done  nothing  to  deserve  it. 

The  "Independent"  in  an  editorial  not  long  ago,  de- 
clared that:  "It  was  the  business  of  the  voters  to  see 
to  it  as  rapidly  as  possible  that  the  Supreme  Court  be 
constituted  of  men  capable  of  grasping  the  idea  that 
property,  like  the  Sabbath,  was  made  for  men  and  not 
men  for  property."  This  demagogic  statement  ignores 
the  fact  that  all  property  is  the  creation  of  some  man 
and  is  in  the  possession  of  the  man  who  creates  it,  or 
of  the  man  who  takes  care  of  it,  not  of  he  who  wastes 
it.  A  fool  and  his  are  soon  parted,  whether  his 
property  be  money  or  cattle  or  lands,  and  the  school 
of  agitators  who  are  so  virtuously  attacking  wealth  are 
simply  urging  that  instead  of  the  responsible  and  con- 
servative people  controlling  government  and  property, 
all  those  of  ability  shall  be  deposed  in  favor  of  the 
irresponsible,  the  thriftless,  the  ignorant,  and  the 
vicious,  hoping  doubtless  to  see  repeated  in  this  coun- 
try the  debacle  now  being  carried  on  in  Russia. 

Those  who  feel  that  there  is  an  unequal  distribution 
of  the  surplus  product  of  the  world,  and  who  argue 
that  it  should  be  re-apportioned  or  destroyed,  ignore 
the  fact  that  in  a  world  where  all  the  individuals  are 
to  share  equally,  it  involves  a  sharing  of  the  losses  as 
well  as  the  profits,  and  that  any  one  who  devoted  his 
time  to  unproductive  labor  or  to  a  hunt  that  failed 
would  be  entitled  to  share  the  product  of  productive 
labor.  This  labor  has  never  been  willing  to  do  even  if 
it  were  able,  which  it  is  not,  for  it  is  never  in  possession 
of  sufficient  surplus  to  care  for  itself  through  a  period 


AMERICAN    ATTITUDE    TOWARD    WEALTH      1Q9 

of  idleness  much  less  take  care  of  a  fellow-worker 
who  found  that  his  crops  had  failed  because  he  neg- 
lected to  plow,  or  that  his  hogs  had  died  in  an  epidemic 
because  he  refused  to  innoculate.  If  you  cannot  share 
losses,  you  can  have  no  equitable  claim  to  share  profits. 

A  recent  editorial  declared  that:  "The  criticism  of 
government  management  of  railroads  is  chiefly  due  to 
the  increased  wages  for  workers."  It  shows  that  the 
increase  of  wages  since  the  government  took  over  the 
management  of  railroads,  amounting  in  the  aggregate 
to  over  Eight  Hundred  Millions  of  Dollars,  amounts 
to  an  increase  of  Four  Hundred  Dollars  per  year  to 
each  employee  of  the  railroads,  and  then  attempts  to 
show  that  this  increase  is  only  costing  the  rest  of  us 
about  ten  dollars  apiece  per  year  which,  added  to  our 
present  cost  of  living,  it  argues,  is  so  small  that  we  have 
no  right  to  complain. 

Now  if  the  Four  Hundred  Dollars  a  year  increased 
wages  to  each  railroad  employee  had  been  made  pos- 
sible by  some  extra  efficiency  on  the  part  of  these  em- 
ployees or  by  some  increased  service  to  the  rest  of  us 
there  would  be  some  excuse  for  the  raise  of  wages, 
but  when  it  has  been  clearly  shown  that  the  increase  in 
wages  was  granted  to  the  railroad  employees  in  re- 
sponse to  a  blackmailing  threat  on  their  part  that  they 
would  deprive  us  of  railroad  service,  and  when  as  has 
been  demonstrated  the  increase  in  wages  has  resulted 
only  in  additional  demands  and  threats,  and  in  de- 
creased efficiency  and  less  train  service,  then  the  rest 
of  us  have  a  right  not  only  to  demand  that  the  wages 
be  reduced  to  where  they  were  before,  but  that  they 


A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 


be  reduced  still  lower  to  the  point  where  they  are  no 
more  than  an  equivalent  for  the  service  that  these  rail- 
road employees  are  grudgingly  rendering  to  the  rest 
of  us. 

The  same  paper  further  argues  that  this  $800,000,- 
000  a  year  in  increased  wages  to  railroad  employees  is 
rapidly  spent.  "What  becomes  of  this  billion  dollars," 
it  asks,  "do  the  railroad  employees  hoard  it  or  store  it 
away  or  invest  it  and  become  plutocrats  ?  Not  at  all," 
it  answers,  "they  get  it  on  Saturday  and  on  Monday 
they,  and  their  wives  spend  it,  leaving  nothing  out  of 
the  sum  added  to  the  accumulated  surplus  of  the  coun- 
try." On  the  other  hand,  it  argues  that  if  this  $800,- 
000,000,  or  billion  dollars,  a  year,  was  saved  as  the 
result  of  efficient  operation  and  added  to  the  dividends 
of  the  railroads,  the  money  would  go  into  the  banks  to 
be  stored  away  and  added  to  the  fund  of  those  who 
already  have  enough.  Good  pay,  it  argues,  means  good 
times,  and  it  claims  that  all  great  national  enterprises, 
railroads,  telegraph  and  telephone  lines,  public  works, 
city  enterprises,  street  cars,  electric  lights,  etc.,  can  pay 
the  highest  wages  without  increasing  the  charge  to  the 
public. 

It  ignores  entirely  the  fact  that  these  great  enter- 
prises, which  it  now  wants  to  be  plundered  for  un- 
earned wages  for  employees,  could  never  have  been 
built  in  the  first  place,  had  it  not  been  for  accumulated 
wealth,  and  that  the  attacks  on  accumulated  wealth, 
the  confiscation  of  incomes  and  the  plunder  of  private 
property  by  recent  socialistic  legislation  has  so  put  a 
stop  to  the  production  of  surplus  and  the  accumulation 


AMERICAN    ATTITUDE    TOWARD    WEALTH       HI 

of  wealth,  that  there  is  now  no  wealth  or  capital  for 
the  further  construction  and  extension  of  these  great 
enterprises ;  that  not  only  are  no  new  enterprises  being 
built  nor  are  existing  ones  being  expanded,  but  that  it 
is  impossible  to  raise  capital  for  the  maintenance  of 
these  great  enterprises  which  are  rapidly  deteriorating 
and  failing  in  their  public  services  to  such  an  extent 
that  it  will  not  be  long  until  they  will  be  unable  to 
employ  anybody  or  pay  any  wages,  much  less  the  in- 
flated, unearned  wages,  which  are  now  forced  out  of 
them  by  blackmailing,  socialistic  and  plundering  legis- 
lation. 

The  recent  tax  legislation  passed  by  Congress  was 
a  deliberate  attempt  to  plunder  capital,  or  accumu- 
lated wealth,  and  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  the  Supreme 
Court  twice  over-ruled  this  deliberate  blackmailing 
legislation,  Congress  for  a  third  time  attempted  to  do 
the  same  thing.  In  the  past  two  years  the  taxes  paid 
by  the  United  States  Steel  Corporation  have  been 
$507,754,000,  or  a  sum  greater  than  its  entire  common 
stock  issue;  greater  than  the  total  revenue  of  our  na- 
tional government  for  any  year  before  the  year  1900. 
Such  taxation  amounts  to  nothing  less  than  the  con- 
fiscation of  property,  or  wealth. 

While  the  rights  of  property  were  respected,  con- 
struction, new  buildings,  development,  characterized 
the  growth  of  New  York  City,  but  recent  taxes  have 
so  plundered  property  owners  in  this  city  that  new 
construction  and  development  have  come  to  a  stand- 
still. 


112  A    DEFENCE    OF    W'EALTH 

Similar  legislation  applied  to  railroads  long  ago 
stopped  any  further  railroad  enterprise,  and  the  pres- 
ent legislation  if  not  immediately  repealed  will  kill  all 
industry  and  initiative  in  this  country.  What  induce- 
ment is  there  to  do  business  or  to  promote  new  enter- 
prises for  the  employment  of  labor,  if  not  only  all 
the  income  but  the  principal  itself  is  to  be  taken  for 
the  payment  of  wages  and  taxes?  Under  present 
conditions  few  will  undertake  new  business,  and  then 
only  in  those  lines  which  constitute  nothing  more  nor 
less  than  a  gambler's  chance,  with  probably  a  greater 
likelihood  that  they  will  lose  the  capital  hazarded  than 
that  they  may  make  anything. 

There  is  no  pretense  on  the  part  of  the  great  rail- 
road labor  unions  that  their  abnormal  wages  have  been 
secured  or  can  be  retained  except  by  threats,  and  by 
the  actual  destruction  of  property,  if  their  threats  are 
not  considered.  Mr.  Garrettson,  the  spokesman  for 
the  railroad  brotherhoods  and  unions,  in  a  recent  in- 
vestigation before  Congress,  testified  as  follows: 

"Any  attempt  to  reduce  wages  is  going  to  strengthen 
the  avowed  forces  of  discontent.  As  one  who  knows 
the  danger  this  country  is  facing,  I  tell  you  we  are  as 
near  a  powder  mine  as  one  can  imagine.  Unless  we 
are  prepared  to  rectify  conditions  to  a  very  consider- 
able degree,  we  shall  only  add  to  the  strength  of  the 
flame  which  at  last  must  communicate  itself  to  a  suffi- 
cient body  of  the  people  as  to  upset  that  which  has  been 
created  by  the  fathers,  who  set  up  this  government." 

In  other  words,  the  railroad  union  deliberately 
threatens  the  rest  of  us  that  if  we  do  not  submit  to 


AMERICAN    ATTITUDE    TOWARD    WEALTH      113 

their  demands,  they  will  start  a  revolution  and  over- 
throw not  only  our  government  but  our  form  of  gov- 
ernment. 

When  the  construction  of  railroads  was  originally 
begun,  it  was  undertaken  by  the  people  who  had  such 
wealth  as  then  existed.  They  believed  that  it  would  be 
a  profitable  investment  for  their  surplus  savings,  to 
serve  the  people  of  the  country  at  large  by  giving  them 
cheaper  and  better  transportation,  but  after  they  had 
invested  their  money  many  times  not  only  without 
profit  but  often  with  actual  loss,  a  school  of  political 
philosophers  arose,  who  argued  that  these  invest- 
ments could  not  be  regarded  as  intended  to  be  profit- 
able to  the  people  who  put  up  the  capital  that  made 
possible  their  construction,  but  that  the  construction 
of  railroads  was  solely  for  the  benefit  of  the  general 
public  and  that  cheap  transportation  should  be  fur- 
nished to  the  general  public  regardless  of  whether  it 
paid  any  return  to  the  capital  expended  in  the  construc- 
tion of  the  railroads  or  not. 

This  school  of  "Economists"  has  now  been  super- 
seded by  another,  which  pretends  to  believe  that  the 
railroads  were  built,  neither  to  secure  a  profitable  re- 
turn for  the  capital  invested  nor  to  render  cheap  and 
efficient  service  to  the  public,  but  solely  for  the  benefit 
of  those  employed  in  running  the  railroads  and  that 
they  have  the  right  not  only  to  deprive  the  capital  in- 
vested of  any  return  but  to  raise  the  rates  paid  by  the 
general  public  regardless  of  the  service  furnished,  or 
its  efficiency,  and  to  distribute  the  proceeds  of  the  in- 
creased rates  among  the  bandit  unions  which  have 


114  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

seized  possession  of  the  railroads,  and  which  threaten, 
if  they  are  not  permitted  to  hold  up  the  entire  country 
for  their  own  benefit,  that  they  will  not  only  deprive 
the  country  at  large  of  railroad  service  but  will  destroy 
the  railroads  themselves. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

DESTROYERS  OF  WEALTH 

Shall  Those  Who  Choose  Not  to  Work  be  Permitted  to 
Live  by  Plunder? 

HROUGH  all  the  material  progress  of  the 
Race  the  instincts  of  the  human  individual 
have  remained  the  same.  The  motives 
moving  man  today  are  identical  with  those 
that  stirred  the  primitive  man.  It  has  always  been  the 
instinct  of  the  savage,  of  the  child,  of  the  ignorant, 
and  the  superstitious,  to  destroy  that  which  they  can- 
not understand.  This  instinct  is  directed  not  only  to 
the  destruction  of  physical  objects,  but  to  the  destruc- 
tion of  individuals,  who  have  thoughts  and  who  teach 
ideas  beyond  the  comprehension  of  the  ignorant  and 
superstitious. 

It  is  this  primitive  instinct  which  is  at  the  bottom 
of  race  antipathy,  each  clan,  tribe  or  race,  hates  and 
strives  to  destroy  those  who  are  unlike  themselves.  It 
is  this  same  instinct  which  makes  the  thrifty  dislike 
the  unthrifty;  which  makes  the  lazy  hate  the  indus- 
trious ;  which  makes  the  uivclean  despise  the  clean.  It 
is  hard  to  recognize  these  primitive  instincts  today,  for 
our  civilization  is  so  complex,  so  elaborate,  so  ornate, 
so  decorative  if  you  please,  that  it  lends  itself  to  pro- 

115 


116 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

tective  "coloring."  It  offers  the  wolf,  the  fox,  the 
weasel,  the  hog,  and  the  jackal,  many  disguises. 

But  if  you  want  to  understand  the  conflicts  and  the 
problems  of  the  present  day,  it  is  only  necessary  to 
strip  away  the  camouflage  of  civilization.  Reduce  the 
problem  to  its  primitive  terms,  strip  it  of  its  disguises, 
and  you  will  recognize  it  at  once.  You  will  find  your- 
self confronted  by  the  world-old  problem : 

SHALL  THOSE  WHO  CHOOSE  NOT  TO 
WORK  BE  PERMITTED  TO  LIVE  BY  PLUN- 
DERING THOSE  WHO  DO  WORK  AND  WHO 
SAVE,  OR  ATTEMPT  TO  SAVE,  THEIR  SUR- 
PLUS PRODUCT  IN  ORDER  TO  GAIN  TIME 
TO  THINK? 

The  most  primitive  instinct  of  all  is  to  seize  what 
one  desires  rather  than  to  work  to  create  it.  The 
present  attacks  upon  wealth  simply  show  the  primitive 
savagery  and  economic  ignorance  of  those  who  advo- 
cate the  seizing  and  appropriating  to  their  own  use 
that  which  has  been  made  or  saved  by  others. 

Those  who  attack  corporations,  are  like  the  foolish 
savage  who  smashes  a  fine  watch  because  he  cannot 
understand  the  cause  of  the  ticking  inside  and  does 
not  care  to  know  any  distinction  of  time  between  sun- 
rise and  sunset. 

The  attacks  upon  wealth  must  be  judged  primarily 
not  on  their  ethical  unsoundness,  nor  by  the  hardship 
that  they  impose  upon  the  possessors  of  wealth  and 
the  individuals  who  have  practiced  thrift  for  one  or 
more  generations,  but  by  their  result  to  and  effect 
upon  the  idle  and  ignorant  mass  of  people,  who  have 


DESTROYERS    OF    WEALTH  117 

done  nothing  of  themselves  to  create  or  to  assist  in 
creating  the  wealth  that  having  enjoyed  they  are  now 
attempting  to  destroy.  If  it  could  be  shown  that 
the  condition  of  the  ignorant,  uneducated,  and  ineffi- 
cient mass  of  the  people  was  actually  better  by  the 
destruction  of  wealth,  created  and  conserved  by  the 
efforts  of  others,  they  would  be  as  justified  in  destroy- 
ing it  as  they  would  be  and  are  justified  in  destroying 
dangerous  wild  animals,  or  the  other  things  of  nature 
that  are  destructive  of  human  life.  But  the  facts  are 
that  wherever  wealth,  or  the  thing  created  by  wealth, 
has  been  destroyed,  labor,  itself,  has  been  the  worst  hit. 

The  use  of  wealth  in  production  has  increased  the 
opportunity  of  employment  for  the  masses,  it  has 
furnished  them  with  facilities  for  creating  more  prod- 
uct with  less  physical  labor;  it  has  raised  their 
standards  of  living;  it  has  reduced  the  cost  of  the 
product  to  the  consumer  and  immeasurably  improved 
the  quality  of  the  product.  It  has  so  multiplied  the 
Race's  power  of  production  that  the  poorest  laborer 
is  now  able  to  live  in  substantial  houses  with  pure 
water  on  tap,  with  bath-rooms,  with  electric  light,  with 
a  fuel  economical  beyond  human  dreams,  all  of  which 
were  unknown  to  and  impossible  to  be  secured  by 
Kings  and  Princes  up  to  a  hundred  years  ago,  and  the 
only  possible  effect  of  the  destruction  of  wealth  would 
be  to  rob  the  masses  of  these  comforts  and  more  or 
less  reduce  them  to  a  primitive  state  of  existence. 

The  attitude  of  Labor  towards  Wealth  is  like  that 
of  the  degenerate  who  after  having  ravished  his  beau- 
tiful victim  deliberately  destroys  her. 


118  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

The  masses,  who  are  engaged  in  attacking  and  de- 
stroying wealth,  profess  to  believe  that  all  property  is 
theft,  and  Lenine  and  Trotsky,  both  German  followers 
of  Marx,  who  first  really  attempted  to  justify  this 
principle,  are  giving  the  world  a  practical  demonstra- 
tion in  Russia  of  the  truth  or  falsity  of  the  Marx 
theories  as  to  who  are  the  creators  and  the  proper 
conservators  of  wealth. 

A  sympathetic  German  observer,  Hans  Forst,  who 
has  been  investigating  conditions  in  Russia,  reports : 

"At  every  corner  in  Petrograd  and  in  Moscow,  so- 
called  'Liquidation  Bureaus'  have  been  established,  in 
which  household  goods  of  all  kinds,  furs,  clothing, 
linens,  furniture,  objects  of  art  and  antiques,  are  sold 
at  ridiculously  low  prices,  if  indeed,  they  can  find  a 
purchaser  at  all,  for  who  cares  to  buy  when  the  requi- 
sition and  confiscation  of  their  furnishings  is  in  full 
swing?  If  purchasers  are  found  at  all  they  are  specu- 
lators who  hope  to  hide  the  cheaply-purchased  articles 
until  other  times,  or  who  understand  even  now  how 
the  goods  may  be  gotten  abroad  by  bribing  and  smug- 
gling. Great  consignments  of  these  liquidated  Russian 
antique  rugs,  works  of  art  and  jewels  have  gone 
across  the  seas  on  Swedish  ships. 

"The  only  possibility  of  improving  the  conditions  of 
the  working  classes  is  by  increasing  production,  but 
the  productivity  of  labor  has  sunk  lowrer  and  lower  by 
degrees.  To  conserve  the  food  supplies  of  the  city, 
the  council  of  the  people,  the  commissioners,  passed  a 
resolution  ordering  into  exile  out  of  the  city  the  so- 
called  'parasitic  elements/  capitalists,  manufacturers, 


DESTRO YERS    OF    WEALTH 119 

bankers,  property  owners,  merchants,  and  all  persons 
who  had  no  specialty  paid  work.  But  the  social  revo- 
lution in  Russia  has  begun  to  realize  that  socialism 
instead  of  organizing  production  has  taken  possessions 
from  their  owners  and  divided  it  among  the  masses  of 
the  poor,  but  this  cannot  last  much  longer,  and  the 
working  class  are  beginning  to  realize  that  they  will 
have  to  starve  and  freeze  in  the  dwellings  of  the  rich 
as  long  as  this  economic  destruction  continues.  The 
working  men  everywhere  complain  bitterly  that  though 
everything  belongs  to  them  they  are  unable  to  get  a 
living." 

Doctor  Ross,  investigating  the  conditions  in  Russia 
since  the  Bolshevik  control  has  been  in  force,  says: 

"Not  only  was  the  working  day  shorter  but  it  was 
broken  by  tea-drinking,  smoking,  chatting  and  political 
discussion.  Whenever  they  felt  like  it  the  men  held  a 
meeting ;  they  would  leave  their  machines  to  talk  poli- 
tics. The  men  usually  required  a  time-wage  to  be  sub- 
stituted for  piecework,  and  at  once  there  was  a  marked 
falling  off  in  productivity. 

"In  last  July  (1918)  the  output  per  man  in  the 
munition  factories  of  Petrograd  was  only  one-quarter 
of  what  it  had  been  before.  The  labor  men,  them- 
selves, frankly  admitted  the  great  slump  in  produc- 
tivity but  said  it  did  not  all  lay  in  labor,  part  of  it  was 
due  to  the  gradual  depreciation  of  machinery  and  to  a 
decrease  in  the  supply  of  raw  materials,  which  of 
course  simply  meant  that  the  producers  of  raw  ma- 
terial were  falling  off  in  their  productivity  as  were  the 
factory  hands  themselves.  The  'Boss'  could  do  little 


120  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

to  speed-up  his  men  for  he  possessed  no  power.  The 
workmen  had  perceived  the  necessity  of  protecting 
their  spokesmen  and  leaders  from  the  resentment  of 
the  boss,  so  his  right  to  discharge  any  man  was  sub- 
jected to  the  veto  of  a  committee  of  the  factory  work- 
ers themselves.  In  one  factory  the  workers  drove  their 
manager  out,  but  a  week  later,  implored  him  to  come 
back  because  they  knew  not  where  to  buy  additional 
jaw  material  or  what  kind  to  order.  In  another  case, 
the  owner  of  a  factory  was  driven  away  by  the  work- 
men who  took  over  the  plant  for  their  own  benefit  and 
attempted  to  run  it.  When  they  had  used  up  the 
supplies  of  raw  materials  on  hand  and  sold  the  manu- 
factured product  and  appropriated  the  proceeds  for 
themselves,  they  found  themselves  without  means  for 
buying  more  raw  material  for  manufacture.  They  then 
began  to  sell  machines  out  of  the  works  to  get  the 
means  for  buying  more  raw  material  but  when  they 
had  secured  the  raw  material  they  found  that  they  had 
sold  some  of  the  machines  necessary  for  working  it 
up  and  that  their  factory  was  useless." 

This  report  is  made  by  a  man  who  has  lost  at  least 
one  university  position  on  account  of  his  advocacy  of 
socialistic  principles. 

The  consideration  accorded  to  striking  union  labor 
in  our  country  during  the  war  has  been  an  invitation 
to  Bolshevism.  When  labor  threatened  to  strike,  with 
threats  of  sabotage  and  actual  attempts  at  it  and  the 
Administration  compelled  employers  to  raise  wages  as 
it  had  before  compelled  the  railroad  companies 
to  raise  them  by  the  passage  of  the  Adamson  Law,  it 


DESTROYERS    OF    WEALTH 121 

convinced  union  labor  that  the  Government  was  afraid 
of  it,  and  it  proved  to  labor  that  it  needed  only  to 
repeat  this  threat  of  strike  with  threats  of  sabotage, 
to  gain  other  and  additional  increases.  This  it  pro- 
ceeded to  do,  until  now  it  is  impossible  for  manufac- 
turers to  find  any  market  for  goods  made  by  labor  at 
the  present  scale  of  wages,  and  labor,  when  it  finds 
that  threats  are  powerless  to  secure  additional  raises, 
will  be  compelled  to  make  good  on  its  threats  and 
practice  sabotage,  and  once  the  destruction  of  property 
begins  the  reign  of  Bolshevism  is  at  hand.  The  in- 
creases of  wages  granted  to  union  labor  under  threat 
in  the  last  three  years  are  nothing  more  or  less  than 
ransoms  paid  for  immunity  from  bandit  attack  like 
those  paid  to  Mexican  Revolutionists,  who  are  patriots 
for  plunder  only.  It  has  been  like  turning  over  to 
highwaymen  your  pocketbook  and  jewelry  under  their 
threat  of  taking  your  life ! 

The  editor  of  the  "Marine  News"  is  authority  for 
the  statement  that  during  the  past  year  (1918)  ship- 
yard labor  of  the  United  States  averaged  twice  the  pay 
that  it  did  four  years  ago  and  that  the  output  of  the 
men  averaged  only  fifty-five  per  cent  of  what  it  did 
before  the  war  broke  out.  Double  pay  and  only  half 
as  much  produced,  or  a  cost  per  unit  of  production, 
four  times  as  great. 

Mr.  Peiz,  the  Director  General  of  the  Emergency 
Fleet  Corporation,  declared  that :  "Labor  had  been  de- 
liberately slack  during  the  war.  In  the  Atlantic  Coast 
shipyards  workmen  received  $2  for  the  same  time 
that  a  year  ago  brought  only  $1,  but  that  the  individual 


122  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

output  was  only  two-thirds  of  what  it  had  been  a  year 
before."  So  that  the  unit  of  cost  production  during 
the  war  was  only  one-third  what  it  was  at  the  be- 
ginning of  the  war.  In  other  words,  bandit  labor 
compelled  us  to  spend  three  times  as  much  of  the  na- 
tion's wealth,  or  accumulated  surplus,  to  produce  our 
war  material  and  defeat  our  enemies,  as  it  would  have 
cost  had  labor  worked  honestly  and  patriotically  for 
the  wages  that  it  was  receiving  at  the  beginning  of  the 
war. 

It  must  be  recognized  that  what  was  produced  by 
labor  for  war  purposes  was  produced  for  the  purpose 
of  destruction,  and  most  of  what  was  produced,  either 
was  destroyed  or  will  be  practically  destroyed  by  being 
junked,  as  it  has  no  other  purpose  except  for  war.  If, 
therefore,  labor  had  been  willing  to  work  for  what  it 
got  before  the  war,  only  one-third  as  much  of  our 
national  capital  or  wealth  would  have  been  consumed 
or  destroyed  by  the  war  as  was  consumed  and  de- 
stroyed, and  our  national  debt  instead  of  being  $25,- 
000.000,000  would  only  be  eight  or  nine  billion  dollars. 
But  labor  deliberately  blackmailed  every  man  who  had 
a  savings-bank  account  or  a  home  or  property  of  any 
kind  and  compelled  us  to  mortgage  our  homes,  our 
properties,  our  business  and  our  income  for  the  rest 
of  our  lives  in  order  to  pay  to  union  labor  blackmail- 
ing wages  that  amounted  to  substantially  twenty-five 
billion  dollars. 

One  of  the  results  of  this  blackmailing  on  the  part 
of  labor  has  been  the  construction  of  a  fleet  of  ships 
by  our  Government  at  a  cost  of  from  $200  to  $300 


DESTROYERS    OF    WEALTH 123 

per  ton,  while  England  is  producing  ships  at  a  cost  of 
$50  per  ton,  and  Japan  at  a  cost  not  much  in  excess  of 
$40  per  ton,  and  yet  some  demagogues  are  pretending 
that  it  will  be  possible  to  operate  these  ships  built  at 
such  extravagant  costs  and  compete  with  England  and 
Japan  for  the  carrying  trades  of  the  seas.  It  is  a  safe 
prophecy  that  not  one  ship  of  these  built  by  black- 
mailing labor  during  the  war  will  ever  carry  a  cargo  in 
competition  with  the  ships  of  other  nations,  and  that 
unless  sold  for  $40  or  $50  a  ton  to  the  business  men 
of  other  nations  and  operated  under  foreign  flags  with 
foreign  crews,  they  will  be  tied  up  at  their  docks  and 
rot  to  pieces  where  they  float. 

Mr.  Frank  Vanderlip  recently  stated  that :  "The  cost 
of  working  a  ship  under  American  laws  and  socialist 
wage  provisions  is  four  times  as  much  as  it  is  for 
working  a  Japanese  ship  and  twice  as  much  as  for 
working  a  British  ship."  But  he  pretends  to  think  that 
in  spite  of  this  handicap,  American  ingenuity  and 
brains  will  in  some  way  make  it  possible  for  the 
United  States  to  operate  our  ships,  which  have  cost 
from  four  to  six  times  as  much  as  Japanese  and  Eng- 
lish ships  have  cost,  at  a  profit.  He  is  indeed  an  opti- 
mist, for  it  is  impossible  to  see  why  anyone  with  the 
genius  necessary  to  accomplish  this  miraculous  feat 
would  waste  his  time  in  attempting  to  do  it  with 
American  ships.  However  great  the  genius  of  such  a 
man  might  be,  he  would  go  to  Great  Britain  or  Japan 
and  exercise  his  genius  there,  where,  with  the  lower 
costs  of  construction  and  the  lower  costs  of  operation, 
his  genius  would  get  from  four  to  six  times  greater 


124 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

return  than  it  would  in  attempting  to  do  the  impossible 
in  this  country  under  the  American  Flag. 

It  is  time  for  this  country  to  appreciate  the  signifi- 
cance of  the  threats  of  Mr.  Gompers,  who  is  the  spokes- 
man for  Organized  Labor.  He  has  declared:  "All 
labor  will  fight  to  the  last  gasp  to  maintain  the  wages 
and  hours  it  has  won  through  the  war." 

While  the  war  was  in  progress  there  were  many  who 
were  willing  to  pretend  that  labor  was  patriotic,  be- 
cause they  feared  that  by  recognizing  and  boldly  stat- 
ing the  true  attitude  of  labor,  they  would  incite  it  to 
increase  its  blackmailing  demands.  But  does  Or- 
ganized Labor  think,  now  that  the  war  is  over  and  the 
tax-payers,  the  farmers,  the  clerks,  the  merchants  and 
the  rest  of  the  country  realize  that  labor  has  by  its 
inordinate  and  outrageous  demands  caused  the  war  to 
cost  $25,000,000,000  more  than  it  ought  to  have  cost, 
that  they  are  going  to  permit  labor  to  keep  on  sucking 
blood  from  the  rest  of  the  country?  How  do  they 
think  that  the  $25,000,000,000  of  wealth  that  was  de- 
stroyed by  the  war  is  to  be  replaced  ?  Is  this  destruc- 
tion of  accumulated  surplus  to  be  replaced  by  encour- 
aging still  shorter  working  hours,  less  production  by 
everybody  and  costs  from  three  to  six  times  greater 
than  they  were  before? 

The  attention  of  the  soldiers,  particularly,  is  invited 
to  the  attitude  of  labor  that  stayed  at  home.  While 
they  were  at  the  front  exposing  their  bodies  and  risk- 
ing their  lives  for  a  dollar  a  day,  Organized  Union 
Labor  at  home  was  demanding  and  receiving  from 
ten  to  forty  dollars  a  day  and  slacking  up  its  output 


DESTROYERS    OF    WEALTH 125 

to  fifty  per  cent  of  what  it  wa$  before  the  war.  And 
now  the  soldiers  have  come  home  to  take  up  work, 
where  everything  they  do  is  being  taxed  to  pay  the 
$25,000,000,000  of  debt  which  was  imposed  upon  the 
country  in  order  to  pay  the  extravagant  demands  of 
the  labor  that  stayed  at  home  and  risked  nothing. 

Labor,  which  during  the  past  two  years  has  been 
forcing  by  its  extravagant  and  unjust  demands  the 
wanton  destruction  and  consumption  of  $25,000,000,- 
000  of  our  National  Wealth,  is  now  anxiously  inquir- 
ing why  someone  does  not  come  forward  with  the 
money  to  finance  the  great  peace-time  projects  that 
were  being  talked  about  before  the  war  was  ended. 
If  labor  had  proved  its  ability  to  conserve  its  earnings 
it  would  find  itself  in  possession  of  much  of  the  $25,- 
000,000,000  of  capital,  or  wealth,  that  it  has  wrung 
out  of  the  rest  of  the  country  and  ought  to  be  in  a 
position  to  finance  its  own  needs  for  some  time  to 
come  without  asking  the  rest  of  the  people  to  hazard 
any  more  of  their  accumulated  surplus  for  the  benefit 
of  labor.  But  there  is  one  particular  thing  in  which 
labor  always  shows  its  discretion  and  that  is  its  abso- 
lute refusal  to  put  any  confidence  in  or  any  financial 
backing  behind  labor.  It  never  backs  itself. 

One  of  the  most  trenchant  criticisms  of  Organized 
Labor  is  one  recently  made  by  Sir  Charles  Allon: 
"Democracy  has  never  been  a  good  judge  of  leaders. 
Labor  mistakes  itself  for  democracy.  By  organiza- 
tion it  controls  much  yet  it  has  failed  completely. 
Everybody  but  labor  itself  knows  that  it  has  failed. 
To  organize  a  strike  is  not  success:  to  have  had  to 


126 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

strike  is  a  confession  of  failure.  Think  of  the  dif- 
ferences of  the  ideals  and  character  of  the  man  who 
went  to  the  trenches  and  gave  his  ungrudging  best  ef- 
forts, his  best  brains,  and  his  life,  if  need  be,  with 
that  other  man  who  spent  his  time  in  slothful  folly 
in  the  factory  under  trade  unionism.  When  union 
labor  men  take  twice  as  long  to  build  even  their  own 
houses  they  increase  their  own  rents  in  proportion,  and 
in  this  method  of  stretching  out  hours  they  have  in- 
creased the  cost  of  living  to  themselves  before  they  in- 
creased their  wages.  The  laboring  men  of  the  United 
States  in  not  using  their  brains  and  their  hands  for 
their  own  good  are  losing  $4,000,000  an  hour,  while  by 
their  slovenliness  they  are  costing  themselves  nearly 
$9,000,000,000  per  annum  which  they  might  produce 
more  than  they  do,  if  they  would. 

"Rich  men  are  the  mainspring  of  enterprise.  Rich 
men  are  rich  not  because  they  have  robbed  the  work- 
ingman  but  because  they  succeed  in  getting  the  work- 
ingman  to  do  as  much  as  they  do  in  spite  of  the  work- 
ingman's  having  robbed  himself." 

In  answer  to  Sir  Charles,  labor  quotes  Colonel 
Roosevelt,  who  declared  that:  "It  is  essential  that  we 
should  wrest  the  control  of  government  from  the 
hands  of  rich  men,  who  use  it  for  unhealthy  purposes." 
But  he  neglected  to  mention  by  name  any  of  these 
mythical  rich  men  who  controlled  the  government,  or 
who  controlling  it  used  it  for  unhealthy  purposes. 

One  of  the  greatest  troubles  of  the  present  time  is 
that  these  attacks  on  our  men  of  brains  and  ability 
and  on  those  who  either  have,  or  have  the  ability  to 


DESTROYERS    OF    WEALTH 127 

accumulate  wealth,  have  made  men  of  such  endow- 
ments withdraw  from  public  life  and  refuse  public 
service.  The  men  who  under  ordinary  circumstances 
would  be  seeking  out  new  enterprises,  creating  new 
industries  and  developing  the  undeveloped  parts  of  the 
world  are  now  doing  nothing. 

Those  who  are  attacking  wealth  pretend,  now,  that 
they  are  only  attacking  "swollen  fortunes"  but  it  will 
not  be  long  until  finding  that  these  are  difficult  to  find, 
they  will  attack  and  plunder  not  only  the  modest  for- 
tunes of  the  so-called  "well-to-do,"  but  the  trifling 
savings  of  the  ordinary  mechanic,  storekeeper,  school 
teacher  and  clerk,  and  with  capital  destroyed  and  driven 
from  public  use,  the  ignorant  will  then  learn  to  what 
extent  they  had  been  dependent  on  the  possessors  of 
brains,  ability,  character  and  wealth. 

Among  the  things  assured  to  our  people  by  our 
Constitution  was  "life,  liberty  and  the  pursuit  of  hap- 
piness." Certainly  this  means  to  assure  comfort  and 
ease  in  age  and  support  out  of  property  saved  during 
a  life  of  thrift.  Do  you  want  this  right  to  be  taken 
away  from  you?  Or  do  you  prefer  to  look  forward 
to  an  old  age  supported  by  old-age  pensions,  which 
may  or  may  not  exist  by  the  time  you  reach  that  period, 
for  by  that  time  the  teachers  of  unthrift  may  find  the 
pension  fund  dissipated  and  decide  that  social  econ- 
omy requires  the  immediate  execution  of  those  who 
are  no  longer  able  to  work  and  support  themselves? 

Most  of  those  who  rail  at  wealth  are  men  who  care 
so  little  for  their  families  and  make  so  little  provision 
for  them  that  when  their  children  are  born  their  wives 


128  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

are  compelled  to  go  to  the  public  hospitals,  created  and 
supported  by  the  wealth  which  their  husbands  are  at- 
tacking, and  when  they  die  the  chances  are  ten  to  one 
that  they  are  buried  at  the  expense  of  some  charity 
that  has  been  created  by  the  very  wealth  that  they 
have  been  trying  to  destroy. 

What  the  ignorant  mob  cannot  see  or  understand, 
is  that  the  man  of  brains  or  of  wealth  must  make 
twenty  dollars  for  them  in  order  to  make  one  for  him- 
self. In  their  effort  to  prevent  him  from  making 
anything,  they  rob  themselves  of  twenty  times  more 
than  he  could  possibly  make  for  himself. 


CHAPTER  IX 
PROGRAMME  OF  LABOR 

//  Proposes  Nothing  Less  Than  a  Reversion  to 
Savagery 

EVERAL  years  ago  (1909),  I  listened  to  a 
course  of  lectures  by  Dr.  Frank  Fetter  of 
Princeton  University,  on  "The  Develop- 
ment of  Social  Legislation."  He  showed 
how  the  conscience  of  Britain  was  stirred  by  the  ex- 
posure of  the  treatment  of  the  idiots  and  insane  in 
their  poorhouses,  and  how  legislation  was  passed  to 
take  care  of  those  who  were  incompetent  and  unable 
to  take  care  of  themselves,  either  through  lack  or  loss 
of  their  minds.  With  this  beginning,  he  showed  the 
growth  and  development  of  social  legislation  to  take 
care  of  other  incompetents.  First,  it  extended  the 
Government  care  to  orphans,  children  without  any 
natural  guardians,  who  were  unable  to  take  care  of 
themselves;  then  to  women,  who  were  regarded  as 
being  so  much  controlled  by  their  affections  and  their 
passions,  or  by  the  men  to  whom  they  were  married, 
that  they  were  unable  to  do  what  was  best  for  them- 
selves ;  and  finally,  how  it  had  extended  from  controll- 
ing the  conditions  of  labor  for  women  to  controlling 
the  conditions  of  labor  for  men,  and  had  finally  con- 
cerned itself  not  only  with  wages  and  the  hours  of 

129 


130 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

labor  but  with  everything  that  concerned  the  social 
condition  under  which  labor  was  performed. 

At  the  conclusion  of  his  course  of  lectures,  the  Pro- 
fessor invited  me  to  make  such  comment  or  criticism 
as  had  occurred  to  me  from  hearing  the  lectures. 

I  replied,  that  to  my  mind  the  most  significant  thing 
brought  out  by  his  whole  course  of  lectures  was  the 
fact  that  union  labor  by  demanding  and  securing  the 
passage  of  the  social  legislation  which  he  had  de- 
scribed, had  voluntarily  classified  itself  along  with  the 
incompetents,  and  that  it  had  by  its  demand  for  such 
legislation  confessed  itself  to  be  incompetent  to  take 
care  of  itself,  both  as  to  social  conditions  and  the 
negotiation  in  regard  to  wages.  That  if  labor  claimed 
that  It  was  able  to  take  care  of  itself,  the  legislation  de- 
manded was  absolutely  indefensible  and  could  not  be 
justified,  but  if  in  connection  with  the  request  for  such 
legislation  the  incompetent  character  of  labor  was 
acknowledged,  the  legislation  could  be  justified,  but 
that  incompetent  labor  could  not  then  be  heard  to  dic- 
tate the  terms  of  the  legislation.  That  the  legislation 
proposed  for  the  protection  of  incompetents  must  be 
prepared  and  approved  not  by  the  incompetents  but  by 
those  who  were  best  able  to  protect  and  take  care  of 
the  incompetents. 

Doctor  Fetter  replied  that  he  had  never  heard  such 
a  revolutionary  idea  advanced  in  connection  with  social 
legislation  but  that  he  was  compelled  to  admit  that  it 
seemed  sound  and  that  he  had  not  at  the  moment  any 
answer  to  the  proposition.  That  was  years  ago  but  he 
has  not  answered  it  yet. 


PROGRAMME    OF    LABOR 131 

Socrates  recognized  the  inability  of  the  people  to 
know  what  was  good  for  themselves  and  drafted  a 
prayer  for  the  Athenians  to  address  to  their  gods : 
"Give  us  what  is  good  for  us,  whether  we  pray  for  it 
or  not,  and  divert  from  us  the  evil  for  us  even  though 
we  pray  for  it."  Labor  might  well  adopt  this  prayer. 

Labor,  which  is  so  industriously  attacking  wealth 
on  the  pretense  that  wealth  represents  something 
stolen  from  labor,  little  realizes  how  much  it  is  de- 
pendent for  what  it  enjoys,  including  the  very  oppor- 
tunity to  work,  to  the  existence  of  this  wealth,  which 
makes  possible  extraordinary  spending  in  the  gratifica- 
tion of  extraordinary  wants.  Many  of  the  things  that 
labor  is  engaged  in  producing  are  truly  luxuries,  and 
cannot  in  any  wise  be  classed  as  necessities,  and  would 
not  be  made  at  all  if  it  were  not  for  the  accumulated 
surplus  which  enables  the  possessors  of  it  to  require 
extraordinarily  fine  work  and  to  pay  skilled  workmen 
extraordinary  wages  in  return  for  fine  work. 

The  economies  practiced  by  our  women  in  the  matter 
of  fine  clothes,  laces,  etc.,  brought  about  by  the  thrift 
campaign  for  war  purposes,  well-nigh  bankrupted 
many  of  the  greatest  stores  and  factories  and  drove 
many  laborers  from  the  production  of  such  goods  into 
munition  factories  and  war  work.  The  present  un- 
employment of  labor  is  doubtless  due  in  part  to  the 
fact  that  women  have  not  yet  begun  buying  luxurious 
clothes,  laces  and  fine  linens  on  the  scale  that  they  did 
before  the  war. 

I  wonder  if  the  people  of  America  realize  that  it 
is  only  through  our  great  corporate  combinations,  our 


132 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

great  trusts,  if  you  please,  that  the  cost  of  living  has 
been  so  reduced  in  proportion  to  the  wages  of  labor: 
the  hours  of  labor  have  been  shortened,  production  has 
been  greatly  increased  and  they  have  been  enabled  to 
take  the  time  to  read  and  misinform  themselves  and 
discuss  and  denounce  the  very  institutions  that  have 
made  possible  their  leisure  in  which  to  indulge  this 
pastime.     The  President  of  Cornell  University,  in  an 
address  to  the  Socialist  Club  of  that  school  said  that : 
"Socialism  claims  to  be  a  gospel  of  justice,  but  what 
is   justice?     Economic   justice,"   he   declared,   "is   to 
be  realized  not  by  the  enactment  of  socialism  but  by 
the  abolition   of   special  privileges."     I   ask  the   dis- 
tinguished gentleman  to  show  me  the  legislation,  or  in 
fact,  any  legislation  that  has  granted  special  privilege 
except  to  labor?    He  further  says  that :  "The  improve- 
ment of   the  condition   of   the  toiling  masses   is  the 
supreme  problem  of  our  age."     But  has  it  not  been 
shown  again  and  again  that  people  resent  being  clothed 
when  they  prefer  going  naked?     They  resent  being 
washed  when  they  prefer  going  unwashed?     When 
will  these  loose  thinkers  and  still  looser  talkers  realize 
that  the  only  sort  of  improvement  that  truly  improves 
is  that  which  individuals  do  to  themselves  and   for 
themselves?    The  only  improvement  that  is  ever  per- 
manent is  that  which  grows  out  of  a  desire  in  the 
minds  and  hearts  of  the  people  themselves.     It  is  use- 
less to  talk  of   improving  toiling  masses  of   people. 
They  must  improve  themselves.    It  is  useless  to  wash 
a  hog  for  he  will  at  once  return  to  his  wallow. 


PROGRAMME    OF    LABOR  133 

This  University  President  also  said  that:  "Poverty 
exists  because  nature  is  niggardly  and  because  man,  if 
not  lazy  and  thriftless  like  the  savage,  is  ignorant  of 
the  mystery  of  nature  and  unsuccessful  in  coping  with 
her."  A  statement  scientifically  true  and  one  which 
absolves  every  person  in  the  world  from  any  respon- 
sibility for  the  poverty  of  others.  If  any  man  labors 
where  nature  is  niggardly  it  is  because  he  is  too  stupid 
or  too  lazy  to  move  himself  to  some  place  where  na- 
ture is  more  beneficent.  If  he  is  ignorant  of  the  mys- 
teries of  nature  he  can  by  study  solve  them  as  have 
others,  or  if  too  lazy  to  do  that,  he  can  share  with 
someone  who  has  solved  these  mysteries,  his  own  in- 
creased production  in  consideration  of  the  mysteries 
being  explained  to  him,  which,  by  the  way,  is  what  he 
does. 

In  early  days  the  knowledge  of  how  to  do  things  in 
different  lines  was  regarded  as  a  craft  or  trade  secret 
and  would  not  be  imparted  by  those  skilled  in  making 
any  particular  line  of  articles,  except  to  others  who 
apprenticed  themselves  to  them  for  periods  of  years, 
nominally  for  the  purpose  of  learning  the  craft  or 
trade  secrets,  but  really  paying  by  several  years  of 
service  for  securing  possession  of  the  craft  or  trade 
device  or  method.  And  if  unskilled,  man  may  by  in- 
dustry become  more  skillful,  or  again  by  making  it 
worth  the  while  of  some  skillful  individual  secure 
from  him  instructions  on  how  to  become  more  skillful. 

The  people,  who  attack  wealth,  do  not  realize  what 
they  are  doing,  and  it  is  common  even  among  those 
who  should  know  better  to  express  fear  over  the 


134  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

growth  of  wealth.  Now  you  must  realize  that  wealth 
is  nothing  more  or  less,  and  never  can  be  anything 
more  or  less  than  the  surplus  of  production  over  con- 
sumption. The  increase  of  wealth  means  nothing  but 
that  as  a  people,  we  are  increasing  the  surplus  of  what 
we  produce  above  what  we  consume,  and  so  piling  up 
that  surplus  to  be  used  in  all  the  possible  ways  in 
which  such  a  surplus  can  be  used. 

We  have  not  yet  begun  to  use  that  surplus  as  we 
should,  because  we  have  had  so  many  uses  for  it  here 
in  our  own  country  in  developing  the  still  undeveloped 
portions  of  our  own  national  territory.  But  when  we 
realize  that  our  own  country  is  the  best  developed 
country  in  the  world,  that  practically  half  of  all  the 
railroad  mileage  on  the  earth  has  been  built  in  our 
own  country,  that  more  than  two-thirds  of  all  the  tele- 
graph and  telephone  lines  in  the  world  have  been 
built  and  are  in  our  own  country,  that  eighty  per  cent, 
of  all  the  automobiles  built  and  in  use  in  the  world  are 
in  our  own  country,  and  that  the  rest  of  the  world  is 
waiting  for  similar  development,  we  must  see  that  far 
from  discouraging  the  creation  and  accumulation  of 
surplus,  or  wealth,  that  we  must  increase  it,  and  turn 
our  surplus,  our  capital,  to  the  developing  of  China  as 
our  own  country  has  been  developed ;  to  the  develop- 
ment of  Australia ;  to  the  development  of  Africa  and 
South  America. 

To  attack  wealth  is  to  attack  thrift.  To  appropri- 
ate the  surpluses  thus  created  means  to  discourage 
work,  and  there  is  no  possible  stopping  between  the 
two  attitudes  toward  civilization.  If  you  preach  thrift 
you  must  protect  created  surpluses.  If  you  attack 


PROGRAMME    OF    LABOR      135 

created  surpluses  you  kill  thrift  and  turn  labor  back 
to  the  point  where  there  is  no  object  in  producing 
anything  more  than  the  individual  can  consume. 

The  movement  for  shorter  hours  is  primarily  a 
movement  directed  against  surplus  production.  It  is 
intended  to  reduce  any  possible  production  to  the 
point  where  a  surplus  will  be  impossible.  It  is,  there- 
fore, directed  primarily  against  the  possible  creation 
of  any  wealth,  and  is  an  effort  on  the  part  of  unthink- 
ing labor  to  reduce  the  whole  world  to  a  condition  of 
living  from  hand  to  mouth. 

The  programme  proposed  by  labor  needs  but  to  be 
studied  to  demonstrate  that  it  proposes  nothing  less 
than  a  reversion  to  savagery. 

Let  us  state  labor's  programme  in  its  own  terms, 
and  let  us  see  where  labor's  programme  leads  us. 

Labor  has  asked,  first,  for  shorter  hours  because 
it  claimed  that  it  was  producing  more  than  could  be 
consumed,  and  was  therefore  piling  up  a  surplus 
which  being  in  the  control  of  others  gave  those,  who 
controlled  it  an  undue  advantage  over  those  who 
produced  it. 

Second,  labor  asked  for  higher  wages  or  a  larger 
share  of  what  it  produced,  claiming  that  since  it  was 
the  producer  of  all  this  product,  that  which  was  con- 
sumed as  well  as  the  surplus  that  remained  above 
ordinary  consumption,  it  was  entitled  to  a  larger  share 
of  the  product  so  that  there  would  be  a  smaller  sur- 
plus left  in  the  hands  of  those  who  controlled  that 
surplus. 

Third,  having  secured  shorter  hours  so  that  the 
total  product  of  their  labor  would  be  less  and  having 


136 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

secured  a  larger  proportion  of  what  they  produced 
as  its  share,  labor  next  insisted  on  cutting  down  the 
product  per  man  to  what  the  poorest  workman  in  the 
lot  could  produce. 

But  while  insisting  on  curtailing  the  product,  labor 
was  unwilling  to  accept  any  less  amount  of  the  pro- 
duct for  itself,  so  that  the  sole  result  of  curtailing  the 
product  was  not  to  reduce  the  amount  of  the  product 
that  labor  received  but  was  to  reduce  the  surplus  left 
over  for  those  who  had  gathered  the  material  for  labor 
to  work  on  and  who  protected  the  surplus  for  distri- 
bution during  times  of  temporary  shortage. 

This  process  has  been  continued  until  surpluses 
have  been  consumed  in  some  lines,  as  in  coal,  in 
which  line  labor  has  succeeded  in  decreasing  its  hours 
and  increasing  its  proportion  of  the  product  until  the 
surplus  has  been  entirely  consumed.  And  labor  now 
attempts  to  take  advantage  of  the  necessities  of  the 
other  branches  of  industry  by  refusing  even  to  pro- 
duce coal  unless  the  others  will  permit  labor  engaged 
in  coal  mining  to  make  two  or  three  times  as  much  as 
labor  in  other  lines  of  industry. 

It  is  easy  to  see  where  this  is  going  to  lead.  The 
producer  of  wheat  will  refuse  to  give  the  producer  of 
coal,  wheat  that  it  takes  him  two  days  to  produce  for 
coal  that  it  takes  the  miner  but  one  day  to  produce. 
The  spinner  of  wool  is  not  going  to  give  the  product 
of  two  days  of  his  labor  to  the  coal  miner  for  the 
product  of  one  day  of  his  labor.  Before  they  will  do 
that,  they  will  quit  producing  wheat  and  weaving 
cloth,  and  go  to  producing  coal  themselves.  Now  when 
the  coal  miner  finds  them  doing  the  work  that  he  re- 


PROGRAMME    OF   LABOR 137 

fused  to  do,  he  will  be  compelled  to  attempt  to  prevent 
them — that  would  mean  a  fight. 

When  the  miner  found  the  clothing  man  refusing 
to  furnish  him  clothes,  he  would  attempt  to  raid  the 
clothing  store  and  help  himself,  and  when  he  found 
the  groceryman  refusing  to  sell  him  food,  he  would 
raid  the  grocery  store  or  the  bakery  shop,  with  the 
result  that  the  bakers  and  the  grocery  men  and  the 
clothing  men  would  organize  themselves  together  to 
protect  themselves  against  the  raids  of  the  miners, 
and  they  would  either  wipe  the  miners  off  the  earth 
or  reduce  them  to  a  condition  of  subserviency,  where 
for  a  time  at  least  (that  is  until  they  could  recognize 
the  fact  that  they  were  no  better  than  other  men)  they 
would  be  compelled  by  force  to  remain  in  a  position 
of  slavery  to  the  others.  (See  how  quickly  the  prob- 
lem and  the  conflict  reduces  itself  to  the  identical  level 
of  the  primitive  men). 

The  movement  for  the  curtailment  of  production 
is  for  the  purpose  of  letting  consumption  continue 
until  it  has  wiped  out  all  surpluses.  Each  trade  hoping 
in  this  way  to  force  all  others  to  become  dependent 
upon  it. 

The  wiping  out  of  all  surpluses  means  that  the  whole 
race  must  go  back  to  the  stage  where  it  lives  a  preca- 
rious existence,  where  the  race  has  no  time  to  give 
thought  to  anything  else  but  finding  each  day  that  with 
which  it  may  feed  itself.  If,  for  any  day,  it  should 
fail,  failure  would  mean  hunger,  and  hunger  would 
mean  raids  and  raids  would  mean  reprisals. 

Being  compelled  to  devote  all  of  his  time  to  the 
search  for  food  and  shelter,  no  human  being  would 


138  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

have  time  for  thought  or  for  study,  or  for  invention. 
With  no  time  for  study,  there  would  be  no  time  for 
education.  With  no  time  for  thought  above  the  physi- 
cal fact  of  living  and  keeping  alive,  there  will  be  neither 
religions  nor  morals.  There  were  neither  religions 
nor  morals  before  wealth  creation  began  and  there 
can  be  none  when  wealth  has  vanished,  for  when  self- 
preservation  becomes  the  sole  object  of  existence,  the 
race  is  reduced  to  the  stage  of  animal  existence  and 
becomes  like  animals,  unmoral. 

It  is  time  for  the  educated  idiots  that  run  our  uni- 
versities and  the  sympathetic  simpletons  that  occupy 
the  places  of  prominence  in  the  church  to  realize  that 
by  their  sympathy  with  and  their  support  of  labor 
unionism  and  socialism,  they  are  encouraging  a  course 
of  human  action  and  of  human  conduct  that  will  ulti- 
mately destroy  them,  their  professions  and  the  idols 
which  they  worship. 

The  Board  of  Bishops  of  the  Methodist  Episcopal 
Church  have  recently  sent  a  pastoral  letter  to  the 
eighteen  thousand  ministers  of  their  denomination,  in 
which  they  declare :  "We  favor  an  equitable  wage  for 
laborers,  which  shall  have  the  right-of-way  over  rent, 
interests  and  profits." 

They  do  not  attempt  to  say  what  an  equitable  wage 
shall  be,  and  ignore  the  fact  that  no  wage  can  be 
equitable  which  is  uneconomic.  The  first  necessity 
for  wage  earners  to  get  any  wages  at  all  is  that  the 
industry  must  live.  When  they  propose  that  the  prin- 
cipal or  plant  shall  be  plundered  to  pay  wages  that  are 
not  earned  and  that  cannot  be  paid  out  of  profits,  they 


PROGRAMME    OF   LABOR  139 

are  proposing  nothing  less  than  what  the  Bolsheviki  in 
Russia  are  practicing  and  the  results  will  be  the  same. 

Next  they  say:  "We  favor  collective  bargaining." 
There  is  no  law  in  the  world  prohibiting  collective 
bargaining,  and  no  one  objects  to  it.  There  is  nothing 
to  prevent  any  man,  who  is  not  able  to  drive  a  good 
bargain  for  himself  from  hiring  another  to  represent 
him,  nor  is  there  anything  to  prevent  a  hundred  or  a 
thousand  incompetents  from  appointing  guardians  over 
themselves  to  represent  them  and  to  make  a  collective 
bargain  for  their  services.  The  thing  that  is  objected 
to  and  which  is  uneconomic  and  immoral,  is  the  attempt 
to  compel  the  efficient,  capable  individual  to  abide  by 
a  bargain  made  for  a  thousand  incompetents  by  their 
guardians  and  deny  to  the  efficient,  capable  man,  the 
right  to  bargain  for  himself  and  if  possible  to  make  a 
better  bargain  for  himself  than  the  collective  bargain- 
ers are  able  to  make  for  themselves. 

The  .Bishops  also  say :  "We  favor  advance  to  the 
workers  through  profit-sharing  and  through  positions 
on  boards  of  directorship."  This  is  chiefly  words. 
For  everyone  with  practical  experience  knows  that  the 
employers  of  labor  are  constantly  looking  among 
their  workers  for  men  of  ability  and  ambition  who 
are  able  to  climb  higher.  If  the  Bishops  mean  no 
more  than  this  there  is  little  excuse  for  what  they 
have  said,  but  if  they  mean  anything  else,  it  must  mean 
that  a  share  of  profits  shall  be  given  to  those  without 
ambition  or  ability  or  that  places  on  Boards  of 
Directorship  shall  be  granted  not  to  those  who  seek 
efficiency  and  economic  operation,  but  to  those  who 
will  seek  to  prevent  the  company  from  being  success- 


140 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

ful  and  getting  the  work  out  of  the  men  that  they 
ought  to  get.  Such  a  procedure  is  like  voluntarily  ex- 
posing one's  self  to  contagion  of  a  disease  invariably 
fatal.  The  idea  has  been  tried  in  Russia  and  failed. 

Lenine,  in  addressing  his  followers,  candidly  con- 
fessed that:  "If  socialism  is  to  prevail  it  must  show 
a  production  and  efficiency  superior  to  capitalism,  but 
that  efficiency  is  possible  only  when  a  'boss'  is  instant- 
ly obeyed.  However  free  a  citizen  may  be  outside  of 
the  factory,  once  within  the  factory  and  under  the 
direction  of  a  'boss,'  whom  he  himself  has  helped  to 
select  he  must  serve  that  'boss'  with  military  quickness 
and  exactness.  If  we  cannot  get  production  otherwise 
it  may  be  necessary  to  give  the  'boss'  the  right  to  inflict 
the  death  penalty  on  the  worker  who  refused  to  obey 
orders  as  a  court-martial  does  on  a  mutinous  soldier." 

This  is  the  logical  end  towards  which  labor's  pro- 
gram leads. 

Eighty  years  ago,  in  the  United  States  Senate, 
Daniel  Webster  said :  "There  are  persons  who  con- 
stantly clamor,  they  complain  of  speculation  and  of 
the  pernicious  influence  of  accumulated  wealth.  They 
cry  out  loudly  against  all  banks  and  corporations,  and 
all  means  by  which  small  capitals  become  united  in 
order  to  produce  important  and  fundamental  results. 
They  carry  out  mad  hostility  against  all  established 
institutions.  In  a  country  of  unbounded  liberty  they 
clamor  against  oppression.  In  a  country  of  perfect 
equality  they  move  heaven  and  earth  against  privilege 
and  monopoly.  In  a  country  where  property  is  more 
evenly  divided  than  anywhere  else,  they  rend  the  air 
shouting  agrarian  doctrines.  In  a  country  where  the 


PROGRAMME    OF   LABOR 141 

wages  of  labor  are  high  beyond  parallel,  they  would 
teach  the  laborer  that  he  is  only  an  oppressed  slave. 
They  would  shock  the  foundations  of  industry  and 
dry  up  all  the  streams." 

In  this  country  of  durs  we  have  developed  the 
greatest  power  of  production  in  the  world.  A  power 
of  production  so  great  that  not  only  can  we  not  begin 
to  consume  what  we  produce,  but  it  has  been  esti- 
mated that  we  can  produce  in  this  country  eight  times 
as  much  as  we  can  consume.  Manifestly,  the  pros- 
perity of  this  country  will  not  be  maintained  by  cur- 
tailing our  production,  but  rather  in  seeking  to  sell 
abroad  our  surplus.  If  we  do  not  sell  abroad  or  invest 
abroad  a  large  part  of  our  surplus  production  or 
wealth  we  must  reduce  our  production  at  home. 
Reduced  production  means  less  work,  less  work  means 
less  wages,  less  business  of  all  kinds  and  gradual  stag- 
nation and  hardship.  Look  at  the  damage  that  has 
been  done  to  the  people  of  Russia  by  their  senseless  de- 
struction of  their  own  power  of  production.  Yet  this 
is  the  direct  result  of  that  kind  of  "Public  Ownership" 
which  is  urged  by  labor  as  a  cure  for  our  ills  here. 

The  kind  of  public  ownership  that  we  want  is  not 
the  irresponsible,  wasteful  and  destructive  ownership 
advocated  by  labor  and  socialistic  propagandists.  If 
the  public  want  real  public  ownership  they  have  only 
to  interest  themselves  in  the  businesses  engaged  in 
serving  them.  The  only  proper  kind  of  public  owner- 
ship is  ownership  by  the  citizens  of  all  classes  of  the 
stocks  of  our  railroads,  our  public  utility  corporations 
and  all  those  other  great  companies,  engaged  in  feed- 
ing or  satisfying  the  imperative  needs  of  the  people. 


142  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

If  the  discontented  laboring  man  would  work  a 
couple  of  extra  hours  a  day  for  a  year  and  invest  the 
surplus  so  created  in  stock  of  some  one  of  the  busi- 
nesses engaged  in  public  service,  and  would  thereafter 
devote  a  little  intelligent  study  to  the  conditions  under 
which,  that  or  other  businesses  must  be  conducted,  we 
would  have  real  public  ownership  of  the  kind  that 
would  practically  put  an  end  to  the  discussion  of  the 
senseless  kind  promoted  by  the  professional  critics 
of  wealth. 

When  one  appreciates  the  sanity  of  this  proposition, 
it  seems  reasonable  to  propose  that  no  citizen  should 
be  permitted  to  vote  on  a  question  involving  a  public 
service  proposition  unless  he  could  show  that  he  had 
created  some  surplus  by  his  work  and  invested  that 
surplus  in  the  public  service  corporation  under  discus- 
sion. In  other  words,  if  he  is  not  a  stockholder  in  the 
proposition  he  should  not  have  a  vote.  The  irrespon- 
sible will  always  be  numerically  in  the  majority,  but 
granting  the  interest  of  the  mass  of  people  in  the 
direction  of  government,  and  granting  that  their  in- 
terest in  successful  government  is  greater  than  all 
other  interests,  it  by  no  means  follows  that  the  mass 
of  their  interest  is  entitled  to  direct  the  state,  or  that 
civilization  will  be  better  protected  by  permitting  to 
their  mass  of  mediocre  minds  the  direction  of  the 
society. 

A  pilot  who  knows  the  rocks  is  a  far  safer  navigator 
for  the  ship  of  state  than  any  crew,  however  numerous 
who  know  nothing  of  navigation  and  who  have  no 
acquaintance  with  the  shore. 


CHAPTER  X 
WEALTH  OR  NO  WEALTH 

What  Did  Poverty  Ever  Produce? 

RIMITIVE  man  produced  nothing.  It  was 
for  a  long  time  possible  for  him  to  find 
in  nature  by  a  little  search  all  that  he 
could  consume.  But  as  population  in- 
creased in  the  favored  spots,  effort  became  necessary 
in  order  to  assist  nature  to  produce  enough  to  supply 
the  wants  of  the  increasing  population. 

The  beginning  of  wealth  was  when  the  foresight 
of  one  man  caused  him  to  save  what  had  formerly 
been  thrown  away.  From  that  day  till  this,  the  crea- 
tion and  conservation  of  wealth  has  always  been  a 
triumph  of  judgment  and  of  will  over  instinct  and 
desire.  To  continue  at  work  after  hunger  is  satisfied 
is  an  intellectual  feat.  A  combination  of  that  judg- 
ment, which  assures  us  that  the  continuing  of  work 
under  present  favorable  conditions  will  create  and 
pile  up  a  surplus,  that  will  enable  us  to  take  rest  at  a 
time  in  the  future  when  rest  will  be  more  needed,  and 
the  exercise  of  will  power  to  keep  at  work,  which  our 
judgment  tells  us  is  expedient.  You  know  that  no 
man  can  consume  all  that  he  can  produce. 

The  truth  is  that  every  man  is  born  to  be  rich,  and 
that  those  of  us  who  are  not,  are  not,  because  of  some 

143 


144  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

weakness  of  our  own  which  we  are  unable  or  unwil- 
ling to  curb  or  to  overcome. 

Did  you  ever  as  a  boy,  get  up  early  and  do  your 
chores  before  breakfast,  so  that  you  could  have  the 
rest  of  the  day  to  see  the  circus  or  to  go  to  the  fair? 

Your  efforts  to  do  your  allotted  task  in  a  shorter 
time  than  usual  in  order  that  you  might  have  hours 
or  days  that  you  could  not  otherwise  have  for  pas- 
time or  study,  are  based  on  exactly  the  same  principle 
as  that  involved  in  all  surplus  production  or  wealth 
accumulation.  It  is  the  effort  of  individuals  to  work 
a  little  harder  or  a  little  longer  and  to  produce  more 
than  they  need  for  the  consumption  of  a  day,  a  month 
or  a  year,  in  order  that  they  may  enjoy  a  later  period 
for  recreation  or  study,  or  work  of  a  kind  that  they 
prefer,  without  being  under  the  necessity  of  working 
every  day  for  that  day's  support. 

Remember  wealth  is  not  mere  production !  A  vast 
production  that  is  totally  consumed  creates  no  wealth. 
You  may  produce  ten  times  as  much  as  another  man 
produces,  but  if  you  consume  all  that  you  produce 
while  he  saves  even  a  small  surplus  of  what  he  pro- 
duces, he  is  richer  than  you.  Wealth  is  only  what  is 
left  over  after  consumption.  It  is  the  surplus  stored 
up,  like  the  fat  on  the  bear  that  enables  it  to  live 
through  the  winter  without  other  nourishment. 

It  is  time  for  our  political  philosophers  to  recognize 
and  to  teach  that  it  is  impossible  for  wealth  to  be 
created  dishonestly.  The  existence  of  capital  is  proof 
of  the  fact  that  some  time,  some  where,  some  how, 
some  one  worked  more  than  he  needed  to  work, 
created  more  than  he  could  consume  and  with  foresight 


WEALTH    OR    NO    WEALTH  145 

saved  it.  There  never  was  and  never  can  be  any 
wealth  or  any  capital  created  except  by  work  which  is 
productive  and  creative.  The  possession  of  wealth,  or 
capital,  in  the  hands  of  any  other  than  those  who 
created  it  is  proof  of  the  incapacity  of  the  original 
creators  to  properly  protect  it,  or  care  for  it,  or  use 
it,  and  is  proof  that  it  has  in  compliance  with  that 
higher  and  fundamental  law  of  use,  passed  into  the 
hands  of  those,  who  can  or  at  least  have  the  courage 
to  make  more  or  better  use  of  it. 

Labor,  itself,  has  always  obeyed  this  law  of  use. 
In  primitive  times  the  roving  and  unattached  individ- 
uals sought  out  and  attached  themselves  to  those 
chiefs,  leaders,  or  "bosses,"  that  were  able  to  make 
use  of  them  and  so  make  better  provision  for  them 
than  they  could  make  for  themselves.  Leadership, 
therefore,  fell  to  the  man  who  was  the  best  fighter, 
the  best  hunter,  the  best  herdsman,  the  best  agricul- 
turalist, and  in  these  days,  to  the  man  who  is  the  best 
industrialist.  The  incompetents,  even  while  protest- 
ing against  their  leaders,  have  always  sought  to  work 
for  and  put  themselves  under  the  direction  of  the 
abler  and  more  resourceful  individuals  of  the  race. 

In  primitive  times,  the  accumulation  of  surpluses,  or 
of  wealth,  was  more  or  less  accidental  and  haphazard. 
It  was  always  local.  For  it  was  impossible  with  the 
then  means  of  transportation  and  communication,  to 
use  the  surplus,  or  wealth,  that  existed  in  any  one 
part  of  the  world  for  the  relief  or  development  of  any 
other  part  of  the  world.  Yet  every  evidence  that  we 
now  have  of  the  civilization  that  existed  in  the  past 
is  due  to  the  use  of  the  wealth  that  then  existed,  in 


146 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

expressing  its  thoughts,  its  ideals  and  its  aspirations, 
in  the  monuments,  the  images,  the  rock  cut  caves,  the 
temples,  the  walls,  the  canals,  the  pyramids,  and  other 
monuments  of  the  past. 

Before  you  commit  yourself  to  a  civilization  based 
upon  the  absence  of  wealth,  you  should  take  stock  of 
the  things  that  you  most  need,  that  you  most  use,  that 
you  most  enjoy,  and  then  consider  that  everything 
that  we  regard  as  indispensable  in  our  lives ;  everything 
that  is  expressive  of  what  we  call  civilization  today, 
would  not  have  been  devised  and  never  could  have 
been  made  or  done  had  it  not  been  for  the  existence 
of  great  surpluses  of  great  wealth. 

And  further  that  they  cannot  exist  or  continue  to 
be  made  for  your  use  and  enjoyment  except  by  the 
creation  of  still  greater  surpluses,  or  wealth. 

Only  by  the  accumulation  of  surpluses  in  the  form 
which  we  call  wealth  is  it  possible  to  build  those  great 
works  and  monuments  that  are  the  pride  of  our  civi- 
lization. Only  because  of  their  wealth  was  it  possible 
for  the  Medici  to  keep  Michelangelo  working  for 
years  at  those  wonderful  tombs  and  monuments  that 
are  the  chief  art  treasures  of  Florence  today.  Only 
the  wealth  of  a  Medici  pope  made  possible  the  work 
of  Michelangelo  at  St.  Peter's  and  the  Chapels  of 
the  Vatican.  The  inspiration  that  has  come  to  every 
one,  who  has  ever  been  permitted  to  look  upon  these 
artistic  masterpieces,  has  only  been  possible  because 
of  the  accumulated  wealth  in  the  hands  of  those  who 
were  in  this  way  able  to  support  the  great  master 
while  he  achieved  these  wonders. 


WEALTH    OR    NO    WEALTH 147 

Did  anyone  ever  hear  of  a  great  cathedral  being 
built  or  a  great  artistic  masterpiece  being  created 
through  the  penny  subscriptions  of  the  poor,  or  the 
dollar  per  capita  contributions  of  the  improvident? 

What  would  the  genius  of  a  James  Watt  have  been 
worth  without  capital?  But  by  the  use  of  the  then 
existing  wealth,  he  turned  coal  and  water  into  steam 
and  revolutionized  the  use  of  power,  relieving  for  all 
time  the  race  of  man  from  the  burden  of  winding 
windlasses  or  working  pumps,  and  practically  elimi- 
nated men  and  animals  from  the  work  of  transporta- 
tion. 

It  is  doubtful  whether  our  American  Colonies  could 
have  won  their  independence  had  it  not  been  for  the 
wealth  accumulated  by  George  Washington  and 
Robert  Morris. 

We  would  today  be  without  railroads,  steamships, 
telegraphs,  telephones,  electric  lights,  pure  water, 
steamheat,  phonographs,  moving  pictures,  vacuum 
cleaners  and  all  those  other  things  that  make  life  to- 
day endurable,  had  it  not  been  for  wealth,  created  and 
saved  by  the  judgment  and  self-denying  will  of  those 
who  placed  it  in  the  hands  of  scientific  men,  who  used 
these  accumulations  in  the  creation  and  development 
of  these  wonderful  public  servants.  A  development 
that  they  have  continued  until  all  these  things  have 
been  made  so  cheap  that  their  use  is  practically  uni- 
versal among  the  peoples  pretending  to  civilization. 
We,  in  this  country,  cannot  even  imagine  what  the 
world  was  like  before  they  came  into  use. 

Such  relief  as  was  given  to  stricken  people  in  the 
case  of  the  Galveston  flood,  or  of  the  San  Francisco 


148  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

fire,  or  of  the  Italian  earthquake,  was  impossible  in  an- 
cient times  and  would  remain  utterly  impossible  even 
in  this  day  without  the  existence  of  accumulated  sur- 
pluses or  wealth,  dispensable  by  scientific  methods 
under  modern  conditions. 

Without  accumulated  wealth,  such  great  works  as 
the  construction  of  New  York  City's  subways,  would 
have  been  impossible,  and  all  our  people  who  now 
use  them  would  either  be  cut  off  entirely  from  their 
present  employment,  or  be  compelled  to  take  hours 
to  reach  their  work. 

When  I  think  of  all  these  things,  I  wonder  that  a 
Socialist,  or  a  Bolshevik,  will  ride  on  a  railroad,  or 
use  any  of  the  multitude  of  modern  devices  invented 
by  the  intellectuals,  whom  they  denounce,  and  built 
or  constructed  by  the  wealth,  which  it  is  their  declared 
purpose  to  destroy!  Conscientious  practice  of  the 
principles  that  he  professes  would  require  the  Social- 
ist, the  Bolshevik,  and  the  I.  W.  W.  to  go  down  to  the 
river  to  get  his  drinks,  and  to  walk  wherever  he  goes, 
unless  he  is  able  to  get  some  fellow  to  carry  him. 

Without  accumulated  wealth  the  recent  triumphs 
of  mankind  over  nature  would  have  been  impossible. 
The  Suez  Canal  and  the  Panama  Canal  would  still  re- 
main dreams. 

Without  accumulated  wealth  the  hospitals  of  the 
world  would  remain  unbuilt,  and  such  extraordinary 
benefactions  as  the  Rockefeller  Medical  Research,  the 
Rockefeller  Medical  work  in  China,  and  the  Educa- 
tional Foundation,  would  not  only  be  impossible  but 
would  be  unthought  of.  But  for  the  wealth  of  Amer- 
ica and  Great  Britain  the  world  would  now  be  under 


WEALTH    OR    NO    WEALTH 149 

the  domination  of  the  exponents  of  force  and  plunder. 
Destroy  wealth  and  you  kill  education.  For  only 
by  the  creation  of  surpluses,  is  it  possible  for  any  in- 
dividual to  take  time  off  from  daily  work  to  study. 
Abolish  wealth  and  you  abolish  libraries.  You  abolish 
even  the  use  or  need  of  libraries.  For  when  everyone 
is  living  from  hand  to  mouth,  as  the  labor  programme 
seeks  to  compel,  the  pursuit  of  food  will  leave  no  one 
time  for  reading  or  contemplation.  Destroy  wealth 
and  you  make  impossible  everything  in  the  way  of  art. 
The  success  of  the  propaganda  against  wealth  would 
further  necessitate  the  destruction  of  all  art  now  ex- 
isting, for  fear  that  some  seeing  the  remains  of  the 
art  produced  in  an  age  of  wealth  might  argue  that  it 
would  be  well  for  die  race  to  return  to  the  conditions 
of  a  civilization  that  made  the  production  of  such  art 
possible.  Destroy  wealth  and  you  put  an  end  to  scien- 
tific investigation.  Who  can  study  while  hunger  calls? 
Everything  you  have  or  need  or  use  or  enjoy  is  the 
product  of  wealth.  Wealth !  created  not  by  ignorance 
and  labor  but  by  brains. 


WHAT     DID     IGNORANCE    AND     POVERTY 
EVER  PRODUCE? 

The  man,  who  never  produces  any  surplus  but  who 
works  each  day  only  enough  to  provide  that  day's  con- 
sumption, is  the  man  who  is  truly  poor.  Poor,  be- 
cause, he  never  accumulates  the  surplus  that  enables 
him  to  take  a  day  off  for  recreation  or  study.  Poor, 
because,  the  daily  grind  of  satisfying  the  demands  of 


150  A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

his  stomach  leaves  him  unable  to  do  anything  for  the 
cultivation  of  his  mind.  When  you  realize  that  this 
is  the  essential  quality  of  poverty,  of  poverty  the  result 
of  ignorance  and  the  creator  of  ignorance,  and  as 
such  the  creator  or  cause  of  all  those  vices  and  diseases 
that  thrive  because  of  ignorance ;  when  you  realize 
this  then  you  see  the  moral  heinousness  and  economic 
folly  of  a  social  philosophy  that  pretending  to  wish 
the  betterment  of  mankind,  in  fact  preaches  and  prac- 
tices a  curtailment  of  production  that  forever  fastens 
poverty  and  ignorance  on  those  who  practice  its 
principles. 

Labor  complains  of  the  high  cost  of  living,  and 
blames  this  high  cost  on  the  existence  of  wealth.  It 
professes  to  believe  that  only  by  the  destruction  of 
wealth  can  living  be  made  cheaper.  The  truth  is  that 
rising  prices  which  produce  the  high  cost  of  living  are 
the  result  of  a  consumption  greater  than  production. 
The  only  way  to  reduce  the  price  is  to  increase  the 
production,  yet  labor  insists  on  shorter  hours,  the  cur- 
tailment of  production,  and  fights  every  effort  to  in- 
crease production,  which  alone  can  reduce  the  cost 
of  living.  And  further  than  this,  labor  strives  to  de- 
stroy all  surplus  production,  or  wealth,  which  alone 
can  keep  prices  down  and  the  cost  of  living  low. 

Remember  that  wealth  is  nothing  but  surplus  pro- 
duction created  and  piled  up  in  excess  of  consump- 
tion. Wealth  is  over-production,  and  over-production 
always  tends  to  reduce  prices  and  lower  the  cost  of 
living.  Over-production,  or  the  production  of  a  sur- 
plus in  excess  of  consumption  is  the  creation  of  wealth. 


WEALTH    OR    NO    WEALTH 151 

It  is,  therefore,  only  by  wealth  production  that  we  can 
reduce  prices  and  lower  the  cost  of  living. 

On  the  other  hand,  wealth  destruction,  the  con- 
sumption of  surpluses  and  the  curtailment  of  produc- 
tion, means  rising  prices  and  the  raising  of  the  cost 
of  living  to  a  famine  level. 

It  is  time  for  everyone  to  appreciate  that  the  more 
of  surplus,  or  wealth,  that  there  is  created,  the  more 
there  is  for  distribution,  and  the  more  there  is  for 
each  and  every  man. 

It  is  perfectly  plain  that  we  can  better  our  condition 
only  by  accelerating  the  production  of  wealth,  and  that 
can  only  be  done  by  removing  all  obstacles  to  wealth 
creation,  by  the  universal  use  of  every  labor-saving 
device  that  the  intellectual  Caesars  of  our  race  have 
been  able  to  invent,  and  of  offering  even  greater  in- 
ducements to  the  Caesars  of  genius  living,  or  that  may 
come  hereafter,  to  devise  even  more  wonderful  instru- 
ments for  wealth  creation  than  any  that  have  been 
conceived  or  devised  in  the  past. 

The  issue  is  plain.  A  race  afflicted  with  hunger  and 
cold  gives  no  thought  to  the  immortality  of  the  soul. 
It  was  only  after  the  abolition  of  hunger  and  cold  that 
the  race  began  to  develop  intellectually,  morally  and 
spiritually.  And,  if  the  era  of  hunger  and  cold  shall 
ever  return,  it  will  drive  from  the  thoughts  of  men 
everything  that  we  now  know  of  spirit,  of  morals,  or 
of  intellect. 

Wealth  or  no  wealth?  Comfort  or  no  comfort?' 
Education  or  no  education  ?  Progress  or  no  progress  ? 
Art  or  no  art?  Civilization  or  no  civilization? 


152 A    DEFENCE    OF    WEALTH 

It  is  useless  to  complain  of  the  endowments  that 
nature  has  given  or  has  failed  to  give  to  any  of  us. 
We  may  not  have  been  given  the  brains  or  the  ability 
or  the  talent  ever  to  be  leaders,  but  we  may  at  least 
conquer  our  primitive  instincts  of  wolfishness  and 
thievery  enough  to  enable  us  to  accept  the  leadership 
and  direction  of  those  abler  than  ourselves  and  share 
in  their  prosperity. 

If  you  want  to  prosper  get  in  line  with  those  who 
prosper,  that  is,  with  those  who  produce. 

Wealth  seeks  the  hands  of  those  that  give  it  its 
greatest  use  and  activity,  and  labor  of  its  own  accord 
seeks  employment  where  it  can  be  directed  by  the  best 
brains,  because  there  it  gets  the  better  job,  the  best 
wages  and  lives  the  best.  Who  ever  prospered  by 
working  with  a  business  that  failed? 

I  have  called  attention  to  the  fact  that  wealth  is 
produced  not  by  labor  but  by  brains.  The  image  or 
mark  of  the  Caesars  of  Invention,  of  Transportation, 
of  Business,  is  stamped  upon  every  device  of  the  civi- 
lization we  enjoy  today.  Look  at  the  things  all  about 
you  by  the  use  of  which  you  live;  whose  image  does 
it  bear?  Watt's,  or  Field's,  or  Edison's,  or  Rocke- 
feller's, or  Carnegie's,  or  Armour's,  or  a  hundred 
.other  names  that  I  might  mention. 

Do  you  complain  that  these  men  have  enabled  you 
to  produce  more  and  to  live  better  than  your  fathers, 
or  your  grandfathers,  ever  dreamed  of  producing  or 
living?  Will  you  accept  the  leadership  of  those,  who 
advise  you  to  throw  all  this  away  and  go  back  to  living 
with  only  what  you  can  make  and  do  for  yourself,  or 
will  you  help  preserve  what  you  now  enjoy,  and  if  you 


WEALTH    OR    NO    WEALTH 153 

use  and  enjoy  the  inventions  and  devices  of  other  men, 
if  you  accept  the  service  of  their  superior  brains,  if  you 
seek  their  direction  and  leadership,  because  by  so 
doing  you  do  better  for  yourself,  can  you  doubt  the 
justice  of  paying  tribute  to  them? 

There  was  in  days  of  old  a  people  who  enjoyed 
peace  at  the  hands  of  Caesar  and  in  their  peace  they 
prospered.  But  they  complained  that  out  of  their 
prosperity  they  had  to  pay  tribute  for  the  peace  and 
protection  that  they  enjoyed.  They  sent  to  a  wise  man, 
who  they  knew  neither  cared  for  nor  feared  any  man. 
not  even  Caesar,  and  asked  him  what  they  should  do. 
He  asked  them  to  look  at  the  symbol  of  the  peace  and 
prosperity  that  they  accepted  and  enjoyed  and  behold, 
it  bore  the  mark  of  Caesar  and  he  said :  "Pay  Caesar 
for  that  which  you  owe  to  Caesar."  It  was  the  way 
of  Truth  and  Justice  then  and  it  remains  so  forever! 


INDEX 


Abbot  on  gold  mining,  64. 

Ability,    diversity    of,    23. 

Accumulated  wealth,  use 
of,  81. 

Adamson  Law,  120. 

Allon,  Sir  Charles  quoted, 
125. 

American  Sugar  Compa- 
ny, 102. 

America's  intensive  devel- 
opment, 134. 

Apprentice  system,  133. 

Archimedes,  23. 

Aristotle,  23. 

Arkansas,  blackmailing 
suits  by,  102. 

Armour,  Philip  D.,  73. 

Art  and  wealth,  149. 

Art  treasures,  146. 

Attacks  upon  wealth,  116; 
upon  thrift,  134. 

Aubert,  Georges  quoted,  92. 

Axes  invented,  5. 

B 

Barter,  primitive,  7. 
Bishops,      Methodist      on 

wages,     138;     labor    as 

directors,  139. 
Bolshevism,    Ross    report, 

119;    in    America,    120; 

practice  upheld,  139. 
Born  to  be  rich,  143. 
Blackmailing     by     States, 

101;   by  labor,   122;   on 

cost  of  ships,  122;  labor 
cost,  124. 


Blind,  law  against  seeing, 
104. 

Brains,  in  production,  18; 
subsidized,  24;  value  of, 
29;  in  wealth  creation, 
32;  demand  for,  33; 
withdraw  from  life,  126. 

Bryan,  on  executive  talent, 
67;  fair  pay,  72. 


Caesar,  23. 

Caesars,  intellectual,  151; 
of  invention,  152;  mark 
of,  152. 

Camouflage,  of  civiliza- 
tion, 116. 

Canals,  cost  of,  28. 

Capital,  nothing  cheaper 
than,  34 ;  without  brains, 
33;  with  brains,  41;  at- 
tempts to  dictate  to,  91. 

Carnegie,  sale  of  business, 
41;  income,  how  pre- 
served, 42;  steel  com- 
pany, selling  cost,  43; 
services  to  country,  43; 
his  fortune,  43;  gospel 
of  wealth,  58;  on  part- 
ners, 68;  Ferrero  on,  99. 

Cathedrals,  cost  of,  28; 
how  built,  147. 

Catholic  Church,  level  of 
labor,  77;  Clergy  quoted, 
78. 

Caves  preferred,  8. 

Chinese  scholars,  26. 

Church  sympathy  with 
Socialism,  138. 


INDEX 


Civilization,  progress  of, 
13;  saved  through 
wealth,  51 ;  without 
wealth,  146. 

Clamor,  of  people,  104. 

Coal,  price  in  China,  17; 
preposterous  cost,  37. 

Coleridge  on  inheritance, 
62. 

Competition,  conditions  of, 
59;  cannot  eliminate,  60; 
insures  survival  of  work- 
ers, 60;  economically 
justified,  104. 

Confucius,  23. 

Constitution,  property  un- 
der, 94;  protects  con- 
tracts, 96;  equal  treat- 
ment guaranteed,  97; 
justified  by  growth  un- 
der it,  98;  attacks  due 
to  European  jealousy, 
99. 

Consumption  limited,  36. 

Contagion,  not  understood, 
25. 

Control,  by  government, 
93. 

Corporations,  a  beneficent 
device,  89;  first  ecclesi- 
astical, 96. 

Cornell,  president  of  quot- 
ed, 34;  president  on 
Socialism,  132;  on  pov- 
erty, 133. 

Cost  of  living,  how  raised, 
58;  reduced  by  trusts, 
131;  reduced  by  produc- 
tion, 150. 

Crime,  to  have  sense,  34; 
of  useless  toil,  35. 

Curtailment  of  production, 
136,  137,  141. 


D 

Deaf,  law  against  hearing, 

104. 
Decision      of      intelligent 

men,  38. 
Delaware,   Lackawanna  & 

Western,  103. 
Demagogues  practice  upon 

people,  52;  graft  by,  98; 

basis  of  attacks,  101. 
Destruction  of  wealth,  117. 
Deterioration    of    wealth, 

61. 
Devices  appropriated,   18; 

property   rights    in,    18. 
Dishonesty,  growth  of,  66. 
Dodd,  S.  C.  T.,  40. 
Doers,  attitude  of,  39. 

E 

Economic  thought,  English 
school  of,  21,  22;  French 
school,  21;  Italian  school, 
21;  German  school,  21. 

Economic  loss,  attacks 
on  trusts,  68. 

Edison,  value  to  mankind, 
73. 

Education,  confined  to 
small  per  cent,  37;  and 
wealth,  149. 

Efficiency  condemned,  57. 

Electric  lights,  invented, 
31. 

Elevators,  invented,  31. 

Elliott  on  salaries,  66. 

Endowment  not  equal,  38. 

Enemies  impose  on  people, 
57. 

Epidemics,  cost  of,  25. 

Evolution,  recognized,   60. 


INDEX 


Existence,    how    bettered, 
16. 


Fakirs  of  India,  34. 
Famine,  prices,  151. 
Farm  values,  wheat  prices, 

105. 

Ferrero  on  America,  99. 
Fetter,      Frank,      quoted, 

129,  130. 

Field,  services  of,  45. 
Food,    results    of    better, 

11,  12. 

Fool  and  his  money,  108. 
Forst,    Hans,    on    Russia, 

118. 
Fortunes,  made  by  brains, 

34;  out  of  garbage,  38. 

G 

Galileo,  23. 

Galveston  flood,  147. 

Game,  oldest,  51. 

Garrettson,  threats  of  rev- 
olution, 112. 

Gary,  on  blackmail,  107. 

Georgia  Farm,  story  of, 
49. 

Gompers,  threats  of,  124. 

Grains,  discovered,  4. 

Great  wall,  cost  of,  27. 


Harriman,  genius  for  man- 
agement, 54;  fortune  a 
small  commission,  55. 

Harvesting  machinery,  58. 

Higher  wages,  effect  of, 
135. 


Hill,  James  J.,  54;  on  law- 
making,  76. 

Horse  stealing,  and  ideas, 
19. 

Hunting,  preferred,  9;  re- 
wards, 9,  11;  lucky,  12. 


Ideas,  theft  of,  19;  value 
of,  20;  property  in,  20. 

Ignorant  rich,  82. 

Income,  how  increased,  18. 

Incompetents,  labor  classi- 
fied, 130;  bargain  by 
guardians,  139. 

Independence  won  by 
wealth,  147. 

"Independent"  on  prop- 
erty, 108. 

Inequalities,  human,  12. 

Inheritance,  laws  of,  62; 
protected,  96;  per  cent 
leaving  estates,  79. 

Intellectuals,  attitude  to- 
ward labor  and  wealth, 
26;  extermination  in 
Russia,  44. 

Invention,  property  rights 
in,  29. 

Iron  beams,  invented,  31. 

Italian  earthquake,  148. 


'Journal's"      defense      of 
wealth,  84. 


Kentucky,  bridge  law,  103; 

blackmailing  suits,  102. 
Kingsley  on  Sherman  law, 

90. 


INDEX 


Labor,  directed  by  brains, 
21 ;  non-productive,  22 ; 
without  brains,  33;  re- 
ward of,  47;  ignorance 
of,  47;  cost  of  housing, 
47;  cost  of  clothing,  48; 
cost  of  food,  48;  cost  of 
fuel,  49;  protests  com- 
petition, 60;  never  haz- 
ards anything,  65,  108; 
effect  of  higher  wages, 
78;  like  the  degenerate, 
117;  never  backs  itself, 
125;  robs  itself,  128; 
programme  of,  129. 

Labor  vs.  Labor,  136. 

Lands,  how  valued,  16,  29. 

Laws,  circumvention  of, 
39;  flouted  by  govern- 
ment, 52;  repeal  of  un- 
economic, 57;  interfere 
with  nature,  100;  for 
purposes  of  plunder, 
103. 

Law  of  use,  for  wealth, 
145;  labor  obeys,  145, 
152. 

Lenine,  follower  of  Marx, 
118;  on  production,  140. 

Lightweights,  law  against 
heavyweights,  103. 

Liquidation  bureaus  in 
Russia,  118. 

Loom,  first  invented,  30. 

Lycurgus,  23. 

M 

Marconi,  45. 

"Marine  News"  on  labor, 

121. 

Marx,  theories  of,  118. 
Michelangelo,  146. 


Middleman,  their  cost  to 
the  people,  88;  their 
clamor,  88. 

Millionaires,  proof  of  im- 
providence, 63. 

Mining,  hazards  of,  64. 
Minds,  quality  of,  24. 

M  i  s  s  o  u  ri,   blackmailing 

suits,  101. 

Monuments  of  wealth,  107. 
Morals,     double-standards 

of,   53;    abolished,    138; 

destroyed,  151. 
Morgan,     purchase     from 

Carnegie,   42;   hired  by 

people,  82;  purchase  of 

books,  83;  hospital,  84; 

Ferrero  on,  99. 
Morris,  Robert,  147. 
Municipal  ownership,  folly 

of,  91. 

N 

Nails,  30. 
Nail  mill,  41. 
N.  Y.  City  subways,  148. 
Non-doers,  barking  of,  39. 


Old-age  pensions,  127. 
Over-production,  1  o  w  e  rs 
price,  150. 


Packing  houses,  profits  of, 
52,  87;  should  extend 
services,  87. 

Panama  canal,  148. 

Phillips  quoted,  47. 

Piez  on  labor,  121. 


INDEX 


Pilot,  selection  of,  142. 
Pin  making,  invented,  31. 
Plato,  23. 

Plunder,  of  well-to-do,  127. 
Poor,  gifts  no  benefit,  107. 
Possessors  of  wealth,  51. 

Poverty,  essential  quality, 
149. 

Power  press  invented,  30.    / 

Prices  reduced  by  big 
business,  577^^ais e/^ 
through  attacks,  88. 

Primitive  instincts,  115, 
/116,  152. 

Primitive  conflict  repeat- 
ed, 137. 

Primitive  wealth  haphaz- 
ard, 145. 

Printing  invented,  25. 

Privilege,  of  serving,  66; 
to  work,  100. 

Problem  of  the  ages,  115. 

Production  increased  by 
brains,  29;  how  doubled, 
32;  share  in  increase, 
36;  unlimited,  36;  cre- 
ates surplus,  60;  great- 
est in  America,  141. 

Profiteering  of  small  deal- 
ers, 87. 

Profits,  effects  of  limiting, 
91. 

Property,  conception  of, 
19;  in  Europe,  94;  in 
the  colonies,  94;  effects 
of  confiscation,  96. 

Prosperity  of  America,  94. 

Protective  tariff,  opera- 
tion, 100. 


Public  ownership,  popular, 
141;  sane,  142. 

Pygmies,  law  against  size, 
103. 

Pyramids,  cost   of,  27. 


Raids,  counter,  10;  repri- 
sals, 137;  of  miners,  137. 

Railroads,  invented,  30; 
demands  of  employees, 
52;  possible  through 
wealth,  89;  result  of  at- 
tacks, 89 ;  regulation 
uneconomic,  105 ;  plun- 
der by  labor,  109,  113; 
plunder  squandered,  110. 

Railroad  enterprise,  killed, 
112. 

Railroad  unions,  threat  to 
destroy,  112,  114. 

Rockefeller,  distributes 
cheap  petroleum,  25;  a 
great  borrower,  34 ; 
story  by  Dodd,  40 ;  value 
of  services,  73;  plan  to 
continue  his  service,  85; 
foundations,  148. 

Roosevelt,  attacks  upon 
wealth,  53;  folly  of,  53; 
programme  abandoned, 
53;  on  work,  54;  sower 
of  discontent,  54;  politi- 
cal vocabulary,  55,  56; 
panic  of  1907,  56;  on  in- 
heritance, 61;  the  scan- 
dal of  riches,  67;  on 
rich  men,  126. 

Ross  report  on  Russia, 
119. 

Russia,  debacle  in,  108. 


INDEX 


S 

Sabotage,  121. 
San  Francisco  fire,  147. 

Savagery,  reversion  to, 
135. 

Saws  invented,  6. 

Science  and  wealth,  147, 
149. 

Serving  or  served,  51. 

Sewing  machine  invented, 
30. 

Sherman  Law,  90. 

Ships,  before  American 
Revolution,  28;  cost  of, 
123;  effect  on  operation, 
123. 

Shorter  hours  against  pro- 
duction, 135. 

Skilled  work  required  by 
wealth,  131. 

Slacking  of  labor,  121,  122, 
124. 

Smith,  Adam,  14,  21,  30. 

Socialism,  essence  of,  44: 
attitude  toward  invent- 
ors, 44;  weakness  of, 
45;  in  Russia,  119. 

Social  legislation,  develop- 
ment of,  129. 

Socrates,  23;  prayer  of, 
131. 

Solon,  23. 

Standard  Oil  Co.,  effect  of 
dissolution,  68;  distri- 
bution by,  88. 

Standards  of  living  raised 
by  wealth,  117. 

Steam  power,  discovered, 
24. 


Steamships,  first  success- 
ful, 29;  western  rivers, 
29. 

Steel  ships,  first  built,  31. 

Stephenson,  invents  loco- 
motive, 24. 

Stocks,  full  payment  no 
protection,  71. 

Storm  King  Tunnel,  80. 

Strong,  labor  in  church, 
77. 

Suez  Canal,  148. 

Surplus,  use  of,  7;  neces- 
sary for  study,  35;  to 
support  labor,  74,  79,  80. 

Sze-chuan,  example,  16, 17. 


Taxation,  destroyed  small 
fortunes,  51;  high  rents, 
111;  killing  new  busi- 
ness, 112. 

Tax  legislation,  deliberate 
plunder,  111. 

Telegraph  invented,  30. 

Telephones,  invented,  31. 

Texas,  blackmailing  suits, 
102. 

Thinkers  poorest  paid,  35. 

Tilden  quoted,  75. 

Tillman  on  wealth,  67. 

Tools,  first  invented,  4; 
improved,  6. 

Transport,  limitations  of, 
15. 

Transportation,  primitive 
methods,  17;  cost  of,  18; 
modern  saving,  32. 

Trotsky,  follower  of  Marx, 
118. 

Trust  articles  cheaper,  87. 


INDEX 


U 

Unearned    increment    dis- 
cussed, 71. 

United   States   Steel   Cor- 
poration, taxes,  111. 

Universities    support     so- 
cialism, 138. 


Value,  ideas  of,  8;  of 
earth's  surface,  15;  of 
used  lands,  28;  of  initi- 


3£anaerbilt,  nikde  Empire 
State,  55. 

Vanderlip,  on  American^ 
shipping,  123. 

Vows  of  poverty,  35. 

W 

Wages,  beginning  of,  3; 
effect  of  higher,  36. 

Waste  of  human  energy, 
27;  by  ignorant,  38. 

Washington,   George,   147. 

Watered  coinage  attempt- 
ed, 69. 

Watered  stock,  no  such 
thing,  69;  public  unde- 
ceived, 70. 

Watts,  James,  27,  147. 

Wealth,  beginning  of,  1, 
3;  definition  of,  13; 
under  Roman  Empire, 
13;  days  of  Job,  13;  de- 
fined by  Smith,  Mills  & 
Mongredien,  14;source  of 
14;  world  in  1780, 20,  28; 
world  in  1920,  21;  pro-' 


duced  in  140  years,  21; 
final  definition,  22;  cre- 
ation of,  23;  produced 
by  brains,  32;  not  pro- 
duced by  labor,  32;  why 
controlled  by  few,  37; 
uneconomic  attacks,  51; 
beneficence  of,  58;  accu- 
mulation necessary,  61; 
no  dishonest  wealth,  63, 
144;  risked  in  gambling, 
63;  squandered  by  in- 
competents, 63;  fair  dis- 
tribution, 65;  use  in  dis- 
tribution, 86;  withdraw- 
al from  public  enter- 
prises, 106;  effect  of  re- 
distribution, 108;  de- 
stroyed by  war,  122;  by 
labor,  125;  like  bear  fat, 
144. 

Wealth  accumulation  prin- 
ciple, 144. 

Wealth,    creation,    a    tri- 
umph of  will,  143. 

Webster,  on  popular  clam- 
or, 140. 

Wheat  at  12  cents,  16. 
Writing  invented,  24. 


Yangtse  River,  16,  17. 


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